“The great fault of story tellers is their absurd struggle for striking effects,” observed Jones, with a sententious air, after getting his second cigar well started. “Unless the average story teller has something out of the way, or bloodcurdling, or utterly impossible, he thinks he has nothing to relate at all. Hairbreadth escapes and marvelous encounters are not the only things in this world. The interesting lies all about us. Better a quiet tale well told than a story of shipwreck on the coast of lost Atlantis in the style of a patent office report. Genius, gentlemen, illumes the lowly and gilds the everyday with the splendor which rested on Bagdad’s shrines of fretted gold.”
    “That’s a very true observation, Jones,” returned Jackson Peters. “Oddly enough, I was just on the point of relating a little incident which illustrates it to perfection. I was out in Kansas last fall on election day. It seems that in one precinct a woman had by mistake voted a recipe for currant jelly instead of the regular ticket, and when the female inspectors of election came to it while counting the vote they read it and got into a dispute as to whether or not currant jelly made by it would jell, and”—
    “Come, come, Jackson, our friends here do not want to listen to any such stuff as this. You somehow fail to give it that touch of genius for which you are celebrated. Besides I made those discriminating remarks of mine as a prelude to a humble tale of an experience of my own in Missouri.”
“But Jones,” said Robinson, “you often relate the exciting and marvelous yourself.”
    “Certainly, when it is true. I am not afraid of the striking, or the improbable, if it come within my experience, and I can vouch for each word of it. For instance, when I told you recently of how I once caught an escaped circus tiger by inducing him to put his tail through an augur hole of a board fence and then tying a knot in the tail, did I seem ill at ease? I think not. The more subdued incident which I started to relate happened to me when I had a store in a little backwoods Missouri town.
    “I had not been open a week when one day a large, angular man, with a protruding lower jaw, came in and asked my prices on plug tobacco, revolver, cartridges, bowie knives and bear traps. He was a strikingly large man, probably 6 feet 4 inches, and must have weighed considerably over 200 pounds. He was well proportioned and seemed as quick and active as a cat. He carried a heavy pistol in a holster and appeared irritable and captious. I gave him the figures he asked for, and also mentioned that I carried a full line of pocket flasks, brass knuckles and tools suitable for breaking jail. He listened and then said:
    “ ’Podner, my name is Whipsaw Pepper, and I’m the king of Roaring creek. I live up at the head of the creek, where the old Giasticus sharpens his fangs on the bones of his dead. Everybody on Roaring creek looks up to me and does as I says. They all trade at the store where I say, and I’m in the habit of getting my terbacker [tobacco, Colloq.] and things free for directing of ’em to a store. I’m willing to do this by you.’ He stopped, and his hand rested lightly on the butt of his revolver. Gentlemen, I saw that my success in that neighborhood depended on my action. I laid down the dredge which I used for scratching dried apples out of a barrel, stepped around front behind the counter and kicked Mr. Pepper heavily. Before he could express his surprise either orally or Delsartely I kicked him the whole length of the store, about 10 feet at a kick, and through the front door, leaving a large, jagged hole in it. I then painted this sign and put it on the front of my building:

    “I had no further difficulty and did a lively business for three years, my chief trade coming from the Roaring creek settlement.”
    Jones paused and silently took a match from Smith’s proffered box.
    Robinson straightened up and said, “Jones, that was a good story.”
“Thank you, Robinson, for saying so. Merely a plain account of what happened. But what would our condition now be had we listened to the depressing tale of my young friend here, Jackson Peters, of the lady who cast a curl paper for prohibition? Jackson is all right, but he is young yet. No man can be a good story teller till he is 50 years old and has had large experience in different parts of the world.”—Harper’s Weekly.

From— The Santa Fe Daily New Mexican. (Santa Fe, N.M.), 31 Aug. 1893. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.