Word: madman
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...madman was a clergyman and Conductor, when you receive a fare haunted him all the way to Boston from the moment when "the train started and the car-wheels began their 'clack-clack-clack-clack-clack' ". . . The funeral was a nightmarish medley of blue and buff trip slips for three-cent fares to Heaven...
...King, shrewd madman, peoples his palaces in imagination with the grands seigneurs and ladies of France. "They make the best company," says Ludwig, "because they always go at the first hint from me." Banquets are given, to "the King of France." Ludwig presides, and bewildered Bavarian lackeys must pour out wine and serve viands to a dozen guests who are not there. King Ludwig jests gravely with the empty chair in which is supposed to sit Louis XVI. To Marie Antoinette the sly Ludwig pays less attention. He must not rouse the husband's suspicions ?clever Ludwig! She will...
...squeezing more money for his whims out of his Minister of "Finance than a sane king could ever have secured. Certain it is that he sometimes commanded lackeys to pick up objects which were not there, and, when they pretended to do so, caned them smartly. As a madman, King Ludwig demanded and obtained, among other whims: 1) lifesize clockwork peacocks made to open their wings composed of thousands of bits of colored glass; 2) a sumptuous barge drawn by mechanical swans in which he sailed about as Lohengrin; 3) an artificial grotto simulating that at Capri...
...Such a madman, such a King, could touch the Bavarian heart, fire imaginations, make the very enormity of his follies a .source of national pride. "What country but Bavaria could produce a king so mad as ours?" asked contented tradespeople as they grew rich supplying his luxuries. Even today, Ludwig II, who drowned himself in a fury at last, seems a hero to Bavaria...
...leaves Petersburg, 111., with two of his friends. Hungry, they steal apple pie. His friends get caught, but Kit proceeds, Huck Finn fashion, down the Illinois River into the Mississippi. There on a houseboat he finds Miss Siddons, an impoverished ac tress with a disfigured face, living with a madman. When Kit dis covers that she too is an outcast from Petersburg, he obligingly takes her back there. Expecting to be arrested for the pie episode, he goes to the house of George Montgomery, who takes him in and hides him. Soon the sheriff comes. In a ludicrous trial...