The Struggles of Albert Woods [antikvár]

NAPOLEON WITH A DIFFERENCE Wherever he was, whatever he did, there was always something of the little man about Albert Woods. I might have said wherever he is, whatever he does - he is still alive in 1952-there still is something of the little man about him. For although many of his dreams of glory have come true, you can just as easily see him manfully fighting a brute three times his own size when suddenly his braces burst, or impetuously diving head first into a lake to save a drowning baby when the water happens to be only a foot deep. Some things about a man never change. I doubt if people would have noticed his touch of the little man so quickly if it had not been that really Albert Woods was made on the grand scale. True he was a small man physically, small and sturdy; but his temperament was wondrously grand: it was broad, it was deep and above all it was expansive - so expansive that he often had the air of its having blown him up like a balloon. Albert Woods's temperament was compounded of intelligence gusto and absurdity, of warm-heartedness, cunning and uninhibited imagination, of bombinating passion and sustained pervading will. And the whole shoot was grandiosely inflatable. He was aware of his rich and varied endowment. Albert Woods may have taken most of his life to see that he had a touch of the little man, but he recognized at the age of fourteen that he had more than a streak of Napoleon. He felt like Napoleon. Unfortunately a temperament that is grandiosely inflatable lays its possessor wide open to deflation. Hopefulness was Albert Woods's greatest single inflating agent, and in this world