Mike Flannery | Page 8

th' while. Angora cats I know not be th' spicial species, an' th' long-haired breed av cats is not wan I have associated with much, an' cats so dang dead as this wan I do not kape close in touch with, ginerally, but all cats have a grrand resimblance t' cats. Look at this wan, now. 'T is just like a cat. It kem back."

II
THE THREE HUNDRED
There was a certain big sort of masterfulness about the president of the Interurban Express Company that came partly from his natural force of character and partly from the position he occupied as head of the company, and when he said a thing must be done he meant it. In his own limited field he was a bigger man than the President of the United States, for he was not only the chief executive of the Interurban Express Company, but he made its laws as well. He could issue general orders turning the whole operation of the road other end to as easily as a national executive could order the use of, let us say, a simplified form of spelling in a few departments of the Government. He sat in the head office of the company at Franklin and said "Let this be done," and, in every suburban town where the Interurban had offices, that thing was done, under pain of dismissal from the service of the company. Even Flannery, who was born rebellious, would scratch his red hair in the Westcoate office and grumble and then follow orders.
Old Simon Gratz came into the president's office one morning and sat himself into a vacant chair with a grunt of disapprobation, the same grunt of disapprobation that had been like saw-filing to the nerves of the president for many years, and the president immediately prepared to contradict him, regardless of what it might be that Simon Gratz disapproved of. It happened to be the simplified spelling. He waved the morning paper at the president and wanted to know what he thought of this outrageous thing of chopping off the tails of good old English words with an official carving-knife, ruining a language that had been fought and bled for at Lexington, and making it look like a dialect story, or a woman with two front teeth out.
It rather strained the president sometimes to think of a sound train of argument against Simon Gratz at a moment's notice. Sometimes he had to abandon the beliefs of a lifetime in order to take the other side of a proposition that Simon Gratz announced unexpectedly, and it was still harder to get up an enthusiasm for one side of a thing of which he had never heard, as he sometimes had to do; but he was ready to meet Simon Gratz on either side of the simplified spelling matter, for he had read about it himself in the morning paper. It had seemed a rather unimportant matter until Simon Gratz mentioned it, but now it immediately became a thing of the most intimate concern.
"What do I think?" he asked. "I think it is the grandest thing--the most sensible thing--the greatest step forward that has been taken for centuries. That is what I think. It is a revolution! That is what I think, Mr. Gratz."
He swung around in his chair and struck his desk with his fist to emphasize his words. Mr. Gratz, whose opinions were the more obnoxious because he was a stockholder of the company, sniffed. The way he had of sniffing was like a red rag to a bull, and he meant it as such. The president accepted it in the spirit in which it was meant. He said: "Bah!"
"I will tell you what it is," said Mr. Gratz, pushing his chin up at the president. "It is the most idiotic--"
[Illustration: "_'I will tell you what it is,' said Mr. Gratz_"]
"Don't tell me!" cried Mr. Smalley. "I don't want you to tell me anything! What do you know about the English language, anyhow? 'Gratz!' That is a pretty name for a man who pretends to have a right to say how the English language shall be spelled! Don't I know your history, Mr. Gratz? Don't I know you had your name changed from Gratzensteinburgher? And you pretend to be worried because our President and the most talented men in the country want to drop a few useless letters out of a measly three hundred words! I tell you these changes in spelling should have been made long ago. Long ago. This is the business man's age, Mr. Gratz-and-the-rest-of-it. Yes, sir! And you, as a business man, should be proud of this concession made by our most noted scholars to the needs of the business man."
"Look at 'em!" sneered Mr. Gratz, patting the list of three hundred