DOORS
While doing here our earthly chores, we’re going in and out of doors; doors have a part in all we do, until our little trip is through; and then who knows what sort of door we’ll enter on the other shore?
If I am welcome at your shack you gladly swing the door clear back, and say, “Come in, you blamed old skate, and stay six months, or maybe eight!” But if I sell “The Works of Poe,” you ope the door an inch or so, and cry, “Go chase yourself, gadzooks! We do not want your tinhorn books!”
Oh, doors are good for many things; they’re used by peasants and by kings; the humblest hut has three or two, and palaces have quite a few. And I recall a bitter day, when I climbed on a dappled gray, a horse that wasn’t brought up right; it liked to kick and buck and bite; it threw me off, in wanton style, then sat on me for quite a while. I was so crippled, bruised and sore, men took me home upon a door. It shows how useful doors can be; I always carry two or three.
We’re always viewing doors, you know; they face us everywhere we go; on doors we knock, at doors we wait, and if they’re handsome, smooth and straight, they strike us as a work of art, they’re soothing to the mind and heart. But if they’re warped and out of plumb, and cracked and cheap and on the bum, we think, “The owner doesn’t heed how much his dwelling runs to seed.”
I size up people by their doors; not by the rugs upon their floors.
There’s nothing looks so dad-blamed punk as some cheap door that’s warped and shrunk.
The Curtis hardwood doors are great; they’re always true and fine and straight; their beauty gladdens every eye, and years don’t make that beauty fly. They’re built by experts, and each door is planned to sell a hundred more; each one’s an ad for all the rest, and every Curtis door’s the best.
Oh, I could write a whole lot more, but some one’s rapping at the door.