Goat-Feathers

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 to tell the bitter, agonizing truth about myself, but before I am through, I shall probably lie a mile a minute and crack myself up with something awful! A man can tell only so much truth; then he wabbles. The truth is, I ought to be making as much money as Robert W. Chambers and winning prizes of honour like Ernest Poole, and I’m not. I ought to be better known as a humorist than George Ade and Mark Twain, but I’m not. The trouble is that I am always too ready and eager to break away and gather feathers. If not for that, I might be a millionaire, the President of the United States, or the leading American Author, bound in Red Russian leather. I might have been a Set of Books, like Sir Walter Scott or Dickens or Balzac, and when people passed my house, the natives would say, “No, that isn’t the city hall or the court-house; that’s where Butler lives.” Of course, some strangers would say, “Butler, the grocer?” but that would be the ignorant few. The real people would whisper, “Butler, the Author!” in subdued awe and remove their hats.

Some would pick a blade of grass from my lawn and take it home to hand down to their children’s children as the most treasured family possession. As it is, I have gathered so many goat feathers that half the people introduce me as Ellis Butler Parker and the other half as Butler Parker Ellis, and if there is a ton of hay growing on my lawn, nobody bothers to pick a pint. My father has to cut it and rake it away. Goat feathers, you understand, are the feathers a man picks and sticks all over his hide to make himself look like the village goat. It often takes six days, three hours, and eighteen minutes to gather one goat feather, and when a man has it and takes it home, it is about as helpful and valuable to him as a stone bruise on the back of his neck. I have recently spent several days over a month gathering one goat feather, and as a reward, I was grabbed and chased after another, which ate up two weeks and three days of my time. Goat-feathers are the distractions, sidelines, and deflections that take a man’s attention from his own business and keep him from getting ahead. They are the Greatest Thing in the World—to make a man look like a goat.