Arcadian Adventures with the idle rich by Stephen Leacock - PDF ebook

Arcadian Adventures with the idle rich 

Humor Novel by Stephen Leacock
Excerpt

The Mausoleum Club stands on the quietest corner of the best residential street in the city. It is a Grecian building of white stone. About it are great elm trees with birds — the most expensive kind of birds — singing in the branches. The street in the softer hours of the morning has an almost reverential quiet. Great motors move drowsily along it, with solitary chauffeurs returning at 10.30 after conveying the earlier of the millionaires to their downtown offices. 

The sunlight flickers through the elm trees, illuminating expensive nursemaids wheeling valuable children in little perambulators. Some of the children are worth millions and millions. In Europe, no doubt, you may see in the Unter den Linden avenue or the Champs Elysees a little prince or princess go past with a clattering military guard to do the honor. But that is nothing. Arcadian Adventures It is not half so impressive, in the real sense, as what you may observe every morning on Plutoria Avenue beside the Mausoleum 

Club in the quietest part of the city. Here you may see a little toddling princess in a rabbit suit who owes fifty distilleries in her own right. There, in a lacquered perambulator, sails past a little hooded head that controls from its cradle an entire New Jersey corporation. The United States attorney- general is suing her as she sits, in a vain attempt to make her dissolve herself into constituent companies. Nearby is a child of four, in a khaki suit, who represents the merger of two trunk line railways.

 You may meet in the flickered sunlight any number of little princes and princesses far more real than the poor survivals of Europe. Incalculable infants wave their fifty-dollar ivory rattles in an inarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars of preferred stock laughs merrily in recognition of a majority control going past in a gocart drawn by an imported nurse.

 And through it, all the sunlight falls through the elm- trees, and the birds sing and the hum of the motor so that the whole world as seen from the boulevard of Plutoria Avenue is the very pleasantest place imaginable. Just below Plutoria Avenue, and parallel with it, the trees die out and the brick and stone of the city begin in earnest. Even from avenue 

A Little Dinner you see the tops of the sky-scraping buildings in the big commercial streets and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway, earning dividends. And beyond that again the dty sinks lower and is choked and crowded with the tangled streets and Httle houses of the slums. In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself on Plutoria Avenue you could 

Published 1915

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