Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/186

 it were not for that fly! Of course it is small business to pick flies from such good cream; still, who swallows a drowned fly, if he knows it? Let fashion do what it will; let “Q” say what he will to his pupils; and let Phelps set as many examples as he please, intentionally or not, to delight the literary ghost of Roosevelt! the fact remains that dead flies are not nice, even in the best of cream. Here is a blue bottle-fly, not “As I Like It” but as it appears on page 243 in the cream of Scribner’s for August, 1923:

“When we remember what hardships he endured on the road, what reverses of fortune he suffered, enough to shatter a less indomitable spirit, when we remember the long weeks without hardly any sleep (italics mine) and the wretched cold food he ate in impossible conditions, the fact that he lived to be over eighty must be reckoned among his achievements.”

It no longer is fashionable, if it ever was, to praise the prose of Ingersoll, Beaudelaire,