Today in the year 1909, Edward Everett Hale died.

Hale, as you will recall, is the man who wrote, The Man Without a Country. If you haven’t read this short story, you must. Maybe especially now.

Today’s reading comes from Vol. VIII in the Pocket University Library– American Wit and Humor.

• Hale’s “My Double and How He Undid Me” [link to audiobook]

Turned it into a movie (1912), I see. Here’s the IMDB blurb.

An overworked minister chances upon a man in a poorhouse who looks very much like him, and decides to engage the man to impersonate him and attend the stupid committee meetings and social functions that take up his time and prevent him from doing the work which he wants to put his heart into. The plan succeeds admirably at first and the double is introduced at a sociable at the minister’s own house. The guests do not seem to notice that their pastor is at all different or at all unlike himself when the real man slips out to do his writing and the double takes his place among the guests. At committee meetings he has been taught always to complain of a sore throat and never to make a speech and when at the social always refer to his “wife,” that is, to Mrs. Ingham, the minister’s wife, and let her answer all questions for him on the same “sore throat” plea. All goes well until the double is invited to a dinner and there a city chap gets him to drink a little champagne. He points to his sore throat in extenuation, but the champagne has already begun to do its work, and before the dinner is over he makes a speech which results in his being led from the table by the deacons and taken home. Poor Mrs. Ingham, confronted by the irate deacons and their frisky charge, doesn’t know what to do, but the real minister appearing on the scene, caps the climax and brings the story to a ludicrous finish, for his double promptly embraces him and turns him around so that the two men, seemingly so much alike, face the shocked and horrified deacons, making an explanation unnecessary.

From the written word—

Freed from these necessities, that happy year, I began to know my wife by sight. We saw each other sometimes. In those long mornings, when Dennis was in the study explaining to map-peddlers that I had eleven maps of Jerusalem already, and to school-book agents that I would see them hanged before I would be bribed to introduce their textbooks into the schools—she and I were at work together, as in those old dreamy days—and in these of our log-cabin again. But all this could not last—and at length poor Dennis, my double, overtasked in turn, undid me.

… I began to know my wife by sight. I thought that was hilarious and quite possibly how some men have felt these last few months.

Stay well. Stay safe. Keep reading. Don’t double down on stupid– even if it “succeeds admirably at first.”