Status Updates From Over Seventy (Everyman's Li...

“When he was a boy, his parents must thoughtlessly have told him he was clever, and it has absolutely spoiled him for effective work.”

Of all the hard-boiled, stony-eyed, protruding-chinned lineal descendants of Jesse James who ever took the widow and the orphan by the scruff of the neck and rubbed their noses in the mud, these modern Internal Revenue thugs are the…But I must not allow myself to become bitter. After all, there is a bright side to the income tax.

What we all liked about Sherlock Holmes was his correct attitude in this matter of girls in mystery stories. True, he would permit them to call at Baker Street and tell him about the odd behavior of their uncles and stepfathers - at a pinch he might even allow them to marry Watson - but once the story was under way they had to retire into the background and stay there.

And as for adolescence, I recall nothing except that I had a lot pimples. (Today I have none. How often that happens! We start out in life with more pimples than we know what to do with and, in the careless arrogance of youth, fancy that they are going to last forever; but one morning we find that we are down to our last half dozen, and then those go. There is a lesson in this for all of us, I think.)