The Cheerful Smugglers

Tom and Laura Fenelby hit on an odd scheme to build savings for their infant son, Bobberts: a household tariff, with duty owed on every article carried through their own front door. What starts as a thrifty parlor game becomes a running comedy once guests, relatives, the servant Bridget, and the Fenelbys themselves begin slipping goods past the domestic customs line. Ellis Parker Butler, the humorist behind “Pigs Is Pigs,” borrows the language of protective tariffs and applies it to dinner tables and doorsteps, where the rules collapse about as fast as anyone can invent them. Published in 1908 with illustrations by May Wilson Preston, it is a light, warmly observed sketch of American home life, and it moves quickly enough to finish in a single sitting.