Excerpt from Taking the Count, Prize Ring Stories His full name was Charles Emmet Van Loan, a name to make a mouthful. He signed himself in his private correspondence C. B. Van Loan and in his published writings, Chas. E. Van Loan. But I never knew anybody who knew him but called him "Charley" or more often still, "Van;" and I imagine that to those of his readers who did not know him except as they felt his personality showing through the printed page he was "Charley" Van Loan, nearly always. We employ those shortenings of the proper name only for those we like and for those we love, or for those we feel we would love did we come to know them; they are the slangy diminutives of an universal regard; because no man ever gained an affectionate abbreviation of his baptismal title and kept it who in the estimation of his contemporaries had not earned it by right of friendly conquest. We nickname our geysers, but not our glaciers; the one typifies that which flows, which bubbles, which has motion and sparkle and quickness; the other typifies that which is frozen and slow and hard. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com 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.