: Imperfectly Proper by Donovan Peter Johnston R E Illustrator - Canadian wit and humor; Canadian essays

@FreeBooks

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

IMPERFECTLY PROPER

Illustrated by R. E. JOHNSTON

PRINTED IN CANADA

PETER DONOVAN.

Toronto, Sept. 1920.

That Motor Boat of Algie's Aesthetics and Some Tea Beauty in the Bank Koncerning Kosmetics Clurks and Clarks Ventilation City Chickens Porters, Pullmans and Patience Helping Our Friends to Economize Refreshments at Five Manners for the Masses Raiment and Mere Clothes That Fur Coat Spring in the City Moving Day Vacation Vagaries Lawnless Tennis That Glorious First Drive That Awful First Game On Keeping Cool Back to Nature in a Limousine Stringencies and How to Stringe in Them Taming the Furnace Mike Dogs On Being Handy with Tools Bumps and a Brogue

His name really isn't Algie. It wouldn't do to use his real name--he has a very nice wife, you know. So we shall call him Algie, partly as a disguise, and partly because we wish to be offensive. We want to hurt his feelings. It is our earnest desire that he should read this account and writhe painfully. We claim to be as patient and forgiving as the next one, but there are some subjects--and that motor-boat picnic is one of them. When, in addition to being made sea-sick, being scared into acute heart-disease, and being banged about in a locoed launch like a bean in a coal-scuttle, a gentleman is forced to ruin his second-best pair of--but we anticipate.

For two or three weeks prior to the fatal invitation and the fatal day on which he perpetrated the picnic, Algie had been coming down to the office late every morning--so late in fact that his coming amounted to an afternoon call. Furthermore, his face and shirt bore mysterious smudges of train-oil. And though Algie was never what is known as a "swell dresser," he was always a very neat sort of chap in the matter of his personal adornment.

As soon as he arrived he would immediately begin calling up all sorts of mechanics, plumbers, boiler-makers, painters, boat-builders, and electricians. Lengthy conferences would ensue in which frequent references would be made to cylinders and hulls and carburetors and propellers, and the time when certain jobs should have been done, and what a helluva nerve they had to ask any such price. The language was usually very technical. But it was occasionally quite lucid and human, though not of a nature to bear repetition in print which is intended to go into Christian homes.

During the two or three hours in the afternoon when Algie was with us, he would run out every few minutes and come back with a coil of lead pipe, or a dry battery, or a can of gasoline. And then he would slip away at about four o'clock with an intensely preoccupied air.

We all knew where he was going and what he was going to do. He had bought a motor-boat from a friend, and he was trying to put it in such condition that he could go out in it without having to wear a life-belt. Of course, the friend had guaranteed it as the safest, speediest, staunchest, and trimmest little craft that ever got in front of a ferry-boat on the Bay. But one should never buy a motor-boat from a friend. Better buy it from a deadly enemy. Then you may discover a big hole in the bottom of it, or a dynamite bomb stowed away forward with a clock attachment. But that is all. Once you have patched up the hole or thrown the bomb overboard, you are all right. But when you buy a motor-boat from a friend you are never done with trouble.

After Algie had had the Gladiolus--his wife christened it--for about a week, he realized that he had to put a new engine in it. He put the engine in, got the thing started, and headed for the Island. He got there just in time--to save his life, that is. The Gladiolus sank gently to rest on a sand-bar in three feet of water. The liquid composing the Bay is admittedly rather thick, but it managed to ooze into that boat in about four hundred and forty different places. Algie said afterwards that it had looked to him as though the boat were being invaded by an army of angle-worms.

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Login to post a comment!