Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock Read online

  The Complete Works of

  STEPHEN LEACOCK

  (1869-1944)

  Contents

  The Fiction

  Literary Lapses

  Nonsense Novels

  Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

  Behind the Beyond

  Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

  Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy

  Further Foolishness

  Essays and Literary Studies

  Frenzied Fiction

  The Hohenzollerns in America

  Winsome Winnie

  My Discovery of England

  College Days

  Over the Footlights

  The Garden of Folly

  Winnowed Wisdom

  Short Circuits

  The Iron Man and the Tin Woman

  Laugh with Leacock

  The Dry Pickwick

  Afternoons in Utopia

  Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill

  Model Memoirs

  Too Much College

  My Remarkable Uncle

  Happy Stories

  Last Leaves

  The Short Stories

  List of Short Stories in Chronological Order

  List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order

  The Play

  “Q”: A Farce in One Act

  The Non-Fiction

  Elements of Political Science

  Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government

  Adventurers of the Far North

  The Dawn of Canadian History

  The Mariner of St. Malo

  The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice

  Mackenzie, Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks

  Economic Prosperity in the British Empire

  Mark Twain

  Charles Dickens: His Life and Work

  Humor: Its Theory and Technique, with Examples and Samples

  The Greatest Pages of American Humor

  Humor and Humanity

  Here Are My Lectures

  My Discovery of the West

  Our British Empire

  Canada: The Foundations of Its Future

  Our Heritage of Liberty

  Montreal: Seaport and City

  Canada and the Sea

  While There is Time

  How to Write

  The Autobiography

  The Boy I Left Behind Me

  The Biography

  Stephen Leacock by Peter McArthur

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

  © Delphi Classics 2018

  Version 1

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  The Complete Works of

  STEPHEN LEACOCK

  By Delphi Classics, 2018

  COPYRIGHT

  Complete Works of Stephen Leacock

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Delphi Classics.

  © Delphi Classics, 2018.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

  ISBN: 978 1 78656 406 1

  Delphi Classics

  is an imprint of

  Delphi Publishing Ltd

  Hastings, East Sussex

  United Kingdom

  Contact: [email protected]

  www.delphiclassics.com

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  The Fiction

  Swanmore, a village near Southampton in southern England — Leacock’s birthplace

  Literary Lapses

  The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock was born in England in 1869. His father, Peter Leacock, and his mother, Agnes Emma Butler Leacock, were both from affluent families. The Leacock family, eventually consisting of eleven children, immigrated to Canada in 1876, settling on a one hundred-acre farm in Sutton, Ontario. Young Stephen was home-schooled until he was enrolled at Upper Canada College, Toronto. He became the head boy in 1887 and then entered the University of Toronto to study languages and literature. In spite of completing two years of study in one year, he was forced to leave the university when his father had abandoned the family. Instead, Leacock enrolled in a three-month course at Strathroy Collegiate Institute to become a qualified high school teacher.

  His first appointment was at Uxbridge High School, Ontario, though he was soon offered a post at Upper Canada College, where he remained from 1889 to 1899. He also resumed part-time studies at the University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in 1891. However, Leacock’s real interests were turning towards economics and political theory, and in 1899 he was accepted for postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in 1903.

  Three years later, he wrote Elements of Political Science, which remained a standard college textbook for the next twenty years and became his most profitable book. He also began public speaking and lecturing, and he took a year’s leave of absence in 1907 to speak throughout Canada on the subject of national unity. He typically spoke on national unity or the British Empire for the rest of his life.

  Leacock had begun submitting articles to the Toronto humour magazine Grip in 1894 and was soon publishing numerous humorous articles in Canadian and American magazines. In 1910, he privately published a choice selection of these pieces in Literary Lapses. The book was spotted by a British publisher, John Lane, who issued editions in London and New York, assuring Leacock’s future as a writer. This was followed by Nonsense Novels (1911) – probably his finest collection of humorous sketches — and by the more sentimental favourite, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912). Leacock’s humorous style is reminiscent of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens at their sunniest — evidently shown in the satisfying work My Discovery of England (1922). Collections of Leacock’s sketches continued to follow almost annually, providing an inimitable mixture of whimsy, parody, nonsense and satire that was never bitter.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  My Financial Career

  Lord Oxhead’s Secret

  Boarding-House Geometry

  The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones

  A Christmas Letter

  How to Make a Million Dollars

  How to Live to be 200

  How to Avoid Getting Married

  How to be a Doctor

  The New Food

  A New Pathology

  The Poet Answered

  The Force of Statistics

  Men who have Shaved Me

  Getting the Thread of It

  Telling His Faults

  Winter Pastimes

  The Suburban Trolley Car

  Number Fifty-Six

  Aristocratic Education

  The Conjurer’s Revenge

  Hints to Travellers

  A Manual of Education

  Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas

  The Life of John Smith

  On Collecting Things

  Society Chat-Chat

  Insurance up to Date

  Borrowing a Match

  A Lesson in Fiction


  Helping the Armenians

  A Study in Still Life. — The Country Hotel

  An Experiment with Policeman Hogan

  The Passing of the Poet

  Self-made Men

  A Model Dialogue

  Back to the Bush

  Reflections on Riding

  Saloonio

  Half-hours with the Poets

  A, B, and C

  Leacock as a young man

  My Financial Career

  WHEN I GO into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me.

  The moment I cross the threshold of a bank and attempt to transact business there, I become an irresponsible idiot.

  I knew this beforehand, but my salary had been raised to fifty dollars a month and I felt that the bank was the only place for it.

  So I shambled in and looked timidly round at the clerks. I had an idea that a person about to open an account must needs consult the manager.

  I went up to a wicket marked “Accountant.” The accountant was a tall, cool devil. The very sight of him rattled me. My voice was sepulchral.

  “Can I see the manager?” I said, and added solemnly, “alone.” I don’t know why I said “alone.”

  “Certainly,” said the accountant, and fetched him.

  The manager was a grave, calm man. I held my fifty-six dollars clutched in a crumpled ball in my pocket.

  “Are you the manager?” I said. God knows I didn’t doubt it.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can I see you,” I asked, “alone?” I didn’t want to say “alone” again, but without it the thing seemed self-evident.

  The manager looked at me in some alarm. He felt that I had an awful secret to reveal.

  “Come in here,” he said, and led the way to a private room. He turned the key in the lock.

  “We are safe from interruption here,” he said; “sit down.”

  We both sat down and looked at each other. I found no voice to speak.

  “You are one of Pinkerton’s men, I presume,” he said.

  He had gathered from my mysterious manner that I was a detective. I knew what he was thinking, and it made me worse.

  “No, not from Pinkerton’s,” I said, seeming to imply that I came from a rival agency.

  “To tell the truth,” I went on, as if I had been prompted to lie about it, “I am not a detective at all. I have come to open an account. I intend to keep all my money in this bank.”

  The manager looked relieved but still serious; he concluded now that I was a son of Baron Rothschild or a young Gould.

  “A large account, I suppose,” he said.

  “Fairly large,” I whispered. “I propose to deposit fifty-six dollars now and fifty dollars a month regularly.”

  The manager got up and opened the door. He called to the accountant.

  “Mr. Montgomery,” he said unkindly loud, “this gentleman is opening an account, he will deposit fifty-six dollars. Good morning.”

  I rose.

  A big iron door stood open at the side of the room.

  “Good morning,” I said, and stepped into the safe.

  “Come out,” said the manager coldly, and showed me the other way.

  I went up to the accountant’s wicket and poked the ball of money at him with a quick convulsive movement as if I were doing a conjuring trick.

  My face was ghastly pale.

  “Here,” I said, “deposit it.” The tone of the words seemed to mean, “Let us do this painful thing while the fit is on us.”

  He took the money and gave it to another clerk.

  He made me write the sum on a slip and sign my name in a book. I no longer knew what I was doing. The bank swam before my eyes.

  “Is it deposited?” I asked in a hollow, vibrating voice.

  “It is,” said the accountant.

  “Then I want to draw a cheque.”

  My idea was to draw out six dollars of it for present use. Someone gave me a chequebook through a wicket and someone else began telling me how to write it out. The people in the bank had the impression that I was an invalid millionaire. I wrote something on the cheque and thrust it in at the clerk. He looked at it.

  “What! are you drawing it all out again?” he asked in surprise. Then I realized that I had written fifty-six instead of six. I was too far gone to reason now. I had a feeling that it was impossible to explain the thing. All the clerks had stopped writing to look at me.

  Reckless with misery, I made a plunge.

  “Yes, the whole thing.”

  “You withdraw your money from the bank?”

  “Every cent of it.”

  “Are you not going to deposit any more?” said the clerk, astonished.

  “Never.”

  An idiot hope struck me that they might think something had insulted me while I was writing the cheque and that I had changed my mind. I made a wretched attempt to look like a man with a fearfully quick temper.

  The clerk prepared to pay the money.

  “How will you have it?” he said.

  “What?”

  “How will you have it?”

  “Oh” — I caught his meaning and answered without even trying to think— “in fifties.”

  He gave me a fifty-dollar bill.

  “And the six?” he asked dryly.

  “In sixes,” I said.

  He gave it me and I rushed out.

  As the big door swung behind me I caught the echo of a roar of laughter that went up to the ceiling of the bank. Since then I bank no more. I keep my money in cash in my trousers pocket and my savings in silver dollars in a sock.

  Lord Oxhead’s Secret

  A ROMANCE IN ONE CHAPTER

  IT WAS FINISHED. Ruin had come. Lord Oxhead sat gazing fixedly at the library fire. Without, the wind soughed (or sogged) around the turrets of Oxhead Towers, the seat of the Oxhead family. But the old earl heeded not the sogging of the wind around his seat. He was too absorbed.

  Before him lay a pile of blue papers with printed headings. From time to time he turned them over in his hands and replaced them on the table with a groan. To the earl they meant ruin — absolute, irretrievable ruin, and with it the loss of his stately home that had been the pride of the Oxheads for generations. More than that — the world would now know the awful secret of his life.

  The earl bowed his head in the bitterness of his sorrow, for he came of a proud stock. About him hung the portraits of his ancestors. Here on the right an Oxhead who had broken his lance at Crecy, or immediately before it. There McWhinnie Oxhead who had ridden madly from the stricken field of Flodden to bring to the affrighted burghers of Edinburgh all the tidings that he had been able to gather in passing the battlefield. Next him hung the dark half Spanish face of Sir Amyas Oxhead of Elizabethan days whose pinnace was the first to dash to Plymouth with the news that the English fleet, as nearly as could be judged from a reasonable distance, seemed about to grapple with the Spanish Armada. Below this, the two Cavalier brothers, Giles and Everard Oxhead, who had sat in the oak with Charles II. Then to the right again the portrait of Sir Ponsonby Oxhead who had fought with Wellington in Spain, and been dismissed for it.

  Immediately before the earl as he sat was the family escutcheon emblazoned above the mantelpiece. A child might read the simplicity of its proud significance — an ox rampant quartered in a field of gules with a pike dexter and a dog intermittent in a plain parallelogram right centre, with the motto, “Hic, haec, hoc, hujus, hujus, hujus.”

  * * * * *

  “Father!” — The girl’s voice rang clear through the half light of the wainscoted library. Gwendoline Oxhead had thrown herself about the earl’s neck. The girl was radiant with happiness. Gwendoline was a beautiful girl of thirty-three, typically English in the freshness of her girlish innocence. She wore one of those charming walking suits of brown holland so fashionable among the aristocracy of England, while a rough leather belt encircled her waist
in a single sweep. She bore herself with that sweet simplicity which was her greatest charm. She was probably more simple than any girl of her age for miles around. Gwendoline was the pride of her father’s heart, for he saw reflected in her the qualities of his race.

  “Father,” she said, a blush mantling her fair face, “I am so happy, oh so happy; Edwin has asked me to be his wife, and we have plighted our troth — at least if you consent. For I will never marry without my father’s warrant,” she added, raising her head proudly; “I am too much of an Oxhead for that.”

  Then as she gazed into the old earl’s stricken face, the girl’s mood changed at once. “Father,” she cried, “father, are you ill? What is it? Shall I ring?” As she spoke Gwendoline reached for the heavy bell-rope that hung beside the wall, but the earl, fearful that her frenzied efforts might actually make it ring, checked her hand. “I am, indeed, deeply troubled,” said Lord Oxhead, “but of that anon. Tell me first what is this news you bring. I hope, Gwendoline, that your choice has been worthy of an Oxhead, and that he to whom you have plighted your troth will be worthy to bear our motto with his own.” And, raising his eyes to the escutcheon before him, the earl murmured half unconsciously, “Hic, haec, hoc, hujus, hujus, hujus,” breathing perhaps a prayer as many of his ancestors had done before him that he might never forget it.

  “Father,” continued Gwendoline, half timidly, “Edwin is an American.”

  “You surprise me indeed,” answered Lord Oxhead; “and yet,” he continued, turning to his daughter with the courtly grace that marked the nobleman of the old school, “why should we not respect and admire the Americans? Surely there have been great names among them. Indeed, our ancestor Sir Amyas Oxhead was, I think, married to Pocahontas — at least if not actually married” — the earl hesitated a moment.

  “At least they loved one another,” said Gwendoline simply.

  “Precisely,” said the earl, with relief, “they loved one another, yes, exactly.” Then as if musing to himself, “Yes, there have been great Americans. Bolivar was an American. The two Washingtons — George and Booker — are both Americans. There have been others too, though for the moment I do not recall their names. But tell me, Gwendoline, this Edwin of yours — where is his family seat?”