This affair of mine with the odious ordinance was duly reported in the daily newspapers through the delectable medium of the column headed "Minor Criminal Items." It did not conduce to my equanimity to see my name catalogued with persons arrested for sneak thievery, pocket-picking, drunkenness, brawling, and mayhem. I never before suspected that my friends made a practice of perusing the criminal calendar, but after the appearance of that disagreeable item in print I began to get letters from old acquaintances condoling with me and asking whether they could be of any service to me in my trouble. Some of these letters must have been dispatched in a spirit of humor, but I see nothing mirthfull in the association of an honest man's name with crime, and the people who have sought to poke fun at me in this unpleasant affair need not be at all surprised if I do not bow to them the next time we meet.
Another class of people I have no sympathy with are those who do not recognize in our purchase of a home a cause for general joy and congratulation. You may not believe it, but it is nevertheless a fact that within the last two months I have met people and apprised them of our purchase and they have never so much as expressed even the least bit of delight. My old friend Slashon Tomsing, who makes considerable pretense to being interested in the public welfare--why, when I met him at the Civic Federation rooms not long ago and began to tell him of our new home, instead of being swept away (as it were) upon a tidal wave of rapture, he immediately changed the theme of conversation and asked my opinion of bimetallism. I gave him to understand very distinctly that the public was in very poor business if it suffered itself to become interested in bimetallism or in any other ism so long as it had an opportunity to discuss "our new house" as a living, absorbing, and burning theme.
Another friend, my old and particularly valued friend, Professor Sniff, curator of Mahon's Museum of Marvels--but I'll let that affair pass; for Professor Sniff certainly did not intend to wound my feelings by his apparent indifference; moreover, he has promised to send me for my private collection all the duplicates that occur in section E of his museum, which section is devoted exclusively to dried centipedes, tarantulas, and beetles and to Mexican lizards in bottles of alcohol.