Excerpt from Sandburrs<br><br>A sandburr is a foolish, small vegetable, irritating and grievously useless. Therefore this volume of sketches is named sandburrs. Some folk there be who apologize for the birth of a book. There's scant propriety of it. A book is but a legless, dormant creature. The public has but to let it alone to be safe. And a book, withal! Is its own punishment. Is it a bad book? The author loses. Is it very bad? The publisher loses. In any case the public is preserved. For all of which there will be no apology for sand burrs. Nor will I tell what I think of it. No; this volume may make its own running, without the handi cap of my apology, or the hamstringing of my eriti cism. There should be more than one to do the latter with the least of luck. The Bowery dialect - if it be a dialect - employed in sundry of these sketches is not an exalted literature. The stories told are true, however; so much may they have defence.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.