We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
for isolated, meaningless acts of bravura ; once he climbed a fiftyfoot sandhopper and jumped off into a sandpile, the impact driving his knees into his eyes and blacking them vividly. His companions, one by one, climbed the hopper and stared at the ground, but they climbed back down and went home, while Fields stood carelessly by, massaging his eyes with a handkerchief. Almost from the time he began to talk, he spoke in the extravagant nasal drawl with which he was to become identified. This was substantially a gift from his father, who advertised his wares in a similar tone while following White Swan on the grocery route.
Dukinfield was a great believer in all the known adages about idleness, as they applied to others. He took energetic measures to prevent the boy Claude's mind from becoming a devil's workshop. As soon as Fields was able to walk comfortably, the father took him along on the hawking tours. In after life, Fields always said he felt "undignified as a three-year-old apprentice in the costermonger trade." For one thing, his father's adenoidal cry, minus the h's, struck him as ludicrous. When the boy was called upon, a year or two later, to take up the chant, he applied himself mainly to burlesqueing his father. This led to friction. Fields also had a habit of publicizing vegetables the cart didn't carry, simply because the names pleased him. "Rutabagas, pomegranates, calabashes," he would yell, and the housewives would flock to his side. Dukinfield would explain that his son was new on the job and then cuff him as they bounced down the road.
Fields' schooling was brief — a circumstance that bothered him all his life. By adulthood he recognized this questionable lack in his equipment, and he set out, with characteristic zeal, to overcome it. He bought, among other books, whole sets of Dickens, Thackeray and Stevenson, and read them all. His taste, he once said in discussing this period, was principally for funny characters,
'5