A Little Girl in Tears, and Other Stories

A clubman of nearly fifty, stirred by a novel he has been reading, puts on his fur-lined coat and goes out into a drizzly night looking for adventure, and finds it in a small girl in tears. Around that story stand a deadpan parody of the earnest little books that explained the facts of life to girls by way of bees and flowers, and a run of suburban comedies — water goats, a husband's pockets, a first burglar. Ellis Parker Butler wrote Pigs Is Pigs, the story about guinea pigs and express rates that ran in every American paper, and he keeps the same straight face here. Fifty-four plates by painters including Edward Lamson Henry and Charles Dana Gibson trace the carriages, newsboys, and city streets of the clubman's own era, matching the book's wry turn-of-the-century world.