The Blunders of a Bashful Man

I thought it _was_ smart, sure enough, by the sensation in my eyes. But I have drawn a veil over that bit of my history. I know my eyesight was injured for all that summer. I co...

I have been, am now, and shall always be, a bashful man. I have been told that I am the only bashful man in the world. How that is I can not say, but should not be sorry to beli...

"Out of the frying-pan into the fire!" This should have been my chosen motto from the beginning. The performance of the maddening feat indicated in the proverb has been the prin...

I kept pretty quiet the remainder of that summer--didn't even attend church for several weeks. In fact, I got father to give me a vacation, and beat a retreat into the country d...

It is impossible to make an ordinary person understand the chaos of mingled feelings with which I heard, two days after the circus performance in which I had so large a share, t...

Two days after the fair (one day after the bonfire), some time during the afternoon, I found myself alone in the store. Business was so dull that father, with a yawn, said he gu...

It may seem strange for you to hear of me again, after the conclusion of the last chapter of my blunders. But it was not I who made the last blunder--it was the druggist. Quite...

That was a long day for me. I could not eat the dog-bone which my Pocahontas handed me, having drawn it from the kettle with her own sweet fingers. We traveled all day; having l...

The Widow Jones got her stockings the next day. As I left them at the door she stuck her head out of an upper window and said to me that "the sewing society met at her house on...

I came to my senses in one of the bedrooms of the Shantytown Hotel. There was only a partition between that and the other bedrooms of brown cotton cloth, and as I slowly became...

Babbletown began to be very lively as soon as the weather got cool, the fall after I came home. We had a singing-school once a week, a debating society that met every Wednesday...

"Some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them." I think I have achieved greatness. Of one thing I am convinced: that it is only necessary to do some one thing _w...

In vain I struggled to regain the peace of mind I was beginning to enjoy before I met Flora Knickerbocker. I could not forget her; I dared not approach her--for I had heard a ru...

"Perhaps the locomotive will hear you, and down brakes of its own accord," said Miss Spitfire, scornfully. "I told ma I was gwine to get a husband 'fore I got to Californy, an'...

It is a serious thing to be as bashful as I am. There's nothing at all funny about it, though some people seem to think there is. I was assured, years ago, that it would wear of...

It's very provoking to a bashful man to have the family pew only one remove from the pulpit. I didn't feel like going to church the day after the picnic, but father wouldn't let...

Once more I was settled quietly down to my old life, clerking in my father's store. You would naturally suppose that my travels would have given me some confidence, and that I h...

I had to pawn my watch to get away from Chicago, for the police failed to find my pretty widow. The thought of getting again under my mother's wing was as welcome as my desire t...

My mother and the ancient lady who presided over the mysteries of my initiation as a member of the human fraternity, say that I was born with a caul over my face. Now, what I wa...