Synopsis

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 out now to tell the bitter, agonizing truth about myself, but before I am through I shall probably be lying at the rate of a mile a minute and cracking myself up something awful! A man can tell only so much truth; then he begins to wabble. The truth is, I ought to be making as much money as Robert W. Chambers, and winning prizes of honor like Ernest Poole, and I'm not. I ought to be better known as a humorist than George Ade and Mark Twain rolled into one, and I'm not. The trouble with me is that I am always too ready and eager to break away and go gathering goatfeathers. If it had not been for that I might be a millionaire or the President of the United States or the leading American Author, bound in Red Russia leather. I might have been a Set of Books, like Sir Walter Scott or Dickens or Balzac, and when people ed my house the natives would say, "No, that isn't the city hall or the courthouse; that's where Butler lives." Of cou