Mrs. Gratz opened her eyes and looked out at the drizzle that made the Christmas morning gray. Her bed stood against the window, and it was easy for her to look out; all she had to do was to roll over and pull the shade aside. Having looked at the weather she rolled again on to the broad flat of her back and made herself comfortable for awhile, for there was no reason why she should get up until she felt like it.

If you take a pie and cut it in two, the track of your knife will represent the course of Mud River through the town of Gloning, and that part of the pie to the left of your knife will be the East Side, while the part to the right will be the West Side. Away out on the edge of the pie, where the town fritters away into the fields and shanties on the East Side, dwells Mrs. Deacon, and a fatter, better-natured creature never trod the crust of the earth or made the crust of a pie.

ISOBEL was born in a flat, and that was no fault of her own; but she was born in a flat, and reared in a flat, and married from a flat, and, for two years after we were married, we lived in a flat; but I am not a born flat-dweller myself, and as soon as possible I proposed that we move to the country. Isobel hesitated, but she hesitated so weakly that on the first of May we had bought the place at Westcote and moved into it.

Bobberts was the baby, and ever since Bobberts was born-and that was nine months next Wednesday, and just look what a big, fat boy he is now -his parents had been putting all their pennies into a little pottery pig, so that when Bobberts reached the proper age he could go to college.

Excerpt from The Revolt: A Play in One Act
Scene. - The Class-room. A table. Chairs arranged in semi-circle; an easy chair for Grandma Gregg. Screen in one corner. Chairs or couch upon which to lay wraps and hats. Otherwise an ordinary room. Tea things on the table.
(Pauline, center of stage, with pail, broom, dusting rag, scrubbing brushes and mop, is discovered on hands and knees scrubbing. As curtain, rises she rises to her knees, throws scrubbing brush and soap into the pail, gets up with difficulty and mops the floor. She is singing.)
Pauline. (singing) "All alone, all alone,...

Walking close along the wall, to avoid the creaking floor boards, Philo Gubb, paper-hanger and student of the Rising Sun Detective Agency's Correspondence School of Detecting, tiptoed to the door of the bedroom he shared with the mysterious Mr. Critz. In appearance Mr. Gubb was tall and gaunt, reminding one of a modern Don Quixote or a human flamingo; by nature Mr. Gubb was the gentlest and most simple-minded of men. Now, bending his long, angular body almost double, he placed his eye to a crack in the door panel and stared into the room.

No human being ever tells the whole truth about himself. We seem to be born liars in that particular, all of us, and I am no different. I'm starting out now to tell the bitter, agonizing truth about myself, but before I am through I shall probably be lying at the rate of a mile a minute and cracking myself up something awful A man can tell only so much truth; then he begins to wabble.

Murchison, who lives next door to me, wants to get rid of a dog, and if you know of anyone who wants a dog I wish you would let Murchison know. Murchison doesn't need it. He is tired of dogs, anyway. That is just like Murchison. 'Way up in an enthusiasm one day and sick of it the next.

Lem Redding had a dimple in his cheek that appeared when he smiled. For a boy with a faceful of freckles he was pretty. He had dear, bright gray eyes, and his smile, aided by the dimple, made most folks love him at sight. His hair was brown, as his dead mother's had been; in fact he was much like that mother in more ways than one-far more like her than he was like Harvey Redding, his father. Lem was quick, agile, lively, and Harvey was plumb lazy.

DAVID DEAN caught his first glimpse of 'Thusia Fragg from the deck of the "Mary K" steamboat at the moment when-a fledgling minister-he ended his long voyage down the Ohio and up the Mississippi and was ready to step on Riverbank soil for the first time.