Explore "Many Happy Returns of the Day!" by Ellis Parker Butler on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There is one thing every person has. He may not own a dog or an automobile or a wooden leg, but he has a birthday of his own. Even women have them; they had them before they got the vote.
In a country the size of this, with something like one hundred and ten million inhabitants and only three hundred and sixty-six days in the biggest year now in use, three hundred thousand or more people have birthdays every day. Figures like these astound the intelligence and make reason totter on her throne. Just think! If each of the persons having a birthday to-day received but one birthday card four inches in length, and those cards were placed end to end, they would make a row of birthday cards one hundred thousand feet or more than nineteen miles long, and the cost, if figured at only ten cents each, would be thirty thousand dollars. I wonder why I never went into the birthday-card business!