Guard Dogs Quotes

“There were two true aristocrats in our neighborhood, Mr. Ruppert and Mr. Ehret, the owners of the big breweries. Jake Ruppert’s mansion was on the corner of 93rd and Park Avenue. This was a fabulous place to me, for the principal reason that Ruppert’s garden contained a row of peach trees, which once a year bore lovely, luscious peaches.
Ruppert’s garden also contained two huge watchdogs who ranged along the inside of the iron spiked fence, on the alert for peach poachers. It was the theory of Ruppert’s caretaker that the dogs would be more vicious if they were kept hungry. This theory backfired. I used to hustle a bag of fat and meat scraps from a butcher, feed the starving dogs through the fence until they got friendly and sleepy, then shinny over the spikes and fill my shirt with ripe peaches.
No fruit ever tasted so sweet as stolen fruit, which was about the only kind I ever had until I became, at the age of eleven, a fulltime working man.”
― Harpo Marx, Harpo Speaks!