The discard

About this book

In the grinding, heart-scorching days when Jack and I, in misery's companionship, were loafing in his drug store, he for want of customers and I for want of a job, when the boys across the fish-pond were blasting each other to pieces by the 100,000, all the way from the Swiss Sentinels to the Flanders Flats, when Jack's outlook and ambitions, and my own, were shrunk from a comfortable competence into the next meal and a shelter for the night, when we were cursing Fate and Fortune and the Financiers and our own follies with round, mouth-filling oaths - John who is continually developing some deal or revenue-bearing proposition, proposed and kept prodding at me to Write a Book by way of a forlorn hope of capturing a red herring and giving the gaunt-eyed Spectre Hunger the Merry haha.