THE SANTA FE DAILY NEW MEXICAN — AUGUST 31, 1893
King of the Creek
“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.”
