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JOSH SMITH'S BAR IS practically giving the drinks away. Despite having unleashed an "army of charwomen" to scrub the hotel "from top to bottom"; despite having inaugurated a vacuum cleaner, the first in Mariposa, which "hissed and screamed in the corridors"; and despite having placed at your service a bartender "with a starched coat and wicker sleeves" - despite all this extravagant, "high class" expenditure and more, a drink at the bar will cost you as little as anything else that Smith's hotel has to offer (Leacock, Sunshine Sketches 24).
Anybody was free of the hotel who cared to come in. Anybody who didn't like it could go out. Drinks of all kinds cost five cents, or six for a quarter. Meals and beds were practically free. Any persons foolish enough to go to the desk and pay for them, Mr. Smith charged according to the expression of their faces. (25)1
The good things in life seem to come at little cost.
Yet there are some - indeed, of economically minded scholars, nearly all - whom Stephen Leacock has entertained at the polished bar of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town who fairly bristle at the sight of this genial entrepreneur and who wish us to dismiss his evident liberality as the sign of a ruthless avarice. Like the Mariposans, we might be deceived if we do not recognize this "rapacious," "self-serving," "swelling toad"2 for the embodiment of "rampant individualism and crass materialism" (Lynch 81, 61, 71, 75), which, like an eclipse traversing the sunshine town, bring "out the worst in the Mariposans, the shadows" (72). This is how Gerald Lynch characterizes the "villain in the melodrama of Mariposan life" ( 81 ) in his otherwise complex depiction of Mariposa itself as the topos of an imaginary ideal in Leacock's work. In the fundamentally good, if imperfect, community of Mariposa, Smith is a wolf in sheep's clothing ( 71 ), a "masterfully deceptive interloper," an exploiter with "no redeeming features" (61, 80). Lynch's evaluation of Smith is paradigmatic of Leacock scholarship that studies his fiction in the contexts of his political and economic writings and the political and economic currents of his modern times. This evaluation emphasizes the undeniable perception of this tradition - whether...