Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...same year (1891) that affluent young "Nick" Longworth emerged from Harvard. A tall, bony Yank, he went to the Spanish War, returned to practice law, worked to the top of his Legislature, reached Congress in 1909. His face is lined like bark, but he does not bite. Conservative, shrewd, popular with serious men, he has cast a long shadow at national conventions...
Thenceforward the story proceeds to get Sergey McTavish into more and more trouble. Finally he rescues an American called up before a shrewd Soviet Judge who has a parrot. Each prisoner must poke his forefinger into the parrot's cage. If parrot bites finger, the sentence is Death. Smart Sergey McTavish saves the American's neck by rubbing garlic on his finger, causing parrot to cringe, not bite...
...public schools, Harrison Williams has achieved, more thoroughly than 98% of his contemporaries, the titles of host, amateur scientist, clubman (20 of them), with all of which he is quaintly press-shy. His fortune has come from public utilities, which he developed, not as a sportsman but as a shrewd businessman, and which may now exceed a round hundred millions. He lives at Glen Cove, Long Island, and in the Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, town house of the late Elbert H. Gary, which he purchased last spring...
...that time, thousands of Confederate bonds were daily bought and sold on the London stock exchange. Mouth watering, Fisk conceived the shrewd scheme of hiring a fast clipper to start for England the moment Lee surrendered, sell hand over fist until official news of the defeat, then buy and make delivery when the bonds were practically worthless. Over the 50-mile gap in the telegraph line to Halifax gangs of linemen strung a temporary wire; and in thirteen days-so well had he calculated-Fisk flashed over it the one word "Go!" His clipper reached Liverpool five days before...
Odysseus was ten years getting home from Troy. Therefore, Homer proves him a hero of the sort that is resourceful when shipwrecked, patient when detained. But Erskine proves him a liar of the sort that is shrewd enough in pursuit of romantic adventures, and shrewder yet in making them appear less romantic than brave. Not shrewd enough however to deceive Penelope with his tale of trying for ten years to get home. "Trying, my dear man! Who kept you back?"-"Fate."-"What was her other name...