TAKE IT FROM DAD

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
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Copyright, 1920,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1920.

TAKE IT FROM DAD

Lynn, Mass.

September 25, 19—

Dear Ted:

Your letter asking me if I think you are a failure at school, and wanting to know whether I can give you a job in the factory, came this morning.

"Yes," to the first, and, "I can but I won't" to the second. I didn't send you to Exeter to have you leave in a week; and as for the factory, I guess it can stagger along a couple of years more without you, although I sure do appreciate your wanting to work. It's so different from anything else you have ever wanted, and as Lew Dockstader once said, "Variety is the spice of vaudeville."

Sure, Exeter is a rotten place in the fall, when it rains eight days a week, and there's nothing except soggy leaves and mud everywhere, and a continuously weeping sky that's about as cheerful as the Germans at the peace table. You don't know any one well enough yet to say three words to, and your teachers seem to be playing a continual run of luck, by always calling on you for the part of the lesson you haven't learned.

Sure it's rotten; not Exeter, but what's the matter with you. It begins with an "h" and ends with a "k," but like other diseases, lockjaw excepted, and you'll never have that anyway, it's just as well to catch it young and get it over with.

Then, too, I guess you're beginning to realize that the leader of the Lynn High School Glee Club and left end of the football team isn't so big a frog, after all, when he gets into a puddle with five hundred other boys, most of whom never heard of Lynn.

Your learning this young is a blessing which you don't appreciate now. I had to wait until I took that trip to Binghamton with the Masons. I'd thought till then I was some pumpkins of a shoemaker grinding out eight thousand pairs a day, eleven with two shifts, but when I moseyed through Welt & Toplift's and saw them make fifty thousand pairs without batting an eye, I realized I had been looking at myself through the wrong end of the telescope.

Say, Ted, did I ever tell you about the time your grandfather and grandmother went to the Philadelphia Exposition and left me at Uncle Nate's?

You never saw Uncle Nate; but I don't know as you need feel peeved about it. Anyway, Uncle Nate had whiskers like a Bolshevik, and catarrh. He was a powerful conscientious man, except in a horse dicker, when he shed his religion like a snake does his skin.

Uncle Nate lived over at Epping Four Corners, six miles from our farm, and owing to his judgment of horse flesh he was about as popular there as General Pershing would be at a Red meeting.

I landed at Uncle Nate's at noon, and by six o'clock he had asked me four times if I was a good boy, and I could tell by the look in his eye that he'd ask me that a dozen times more before I went to bed.

Along about seven it began to grow dark and I began to miss my mother. Uncle Nate sat in a rocking chair in the dining room with his feet on the stove, chewing fine cut and reading a farm journal, and I sat in a small chair with my feet on the floor, reading the "Pruno Almanac" and chewing my fingers.

He said nothing, and I said the same. After a while I got so blame lonesome I stole out on the back steps and stood there wishing I was dead or in jail, or something equally pleasant.

Gosh all hemlock! I was homesick. Then I remembered Sandy, our hired man, was still at the farm. I pointed my nose toward home and skedaddled and, believe me, I went some until I hit the woods just below the intervale, where the wind was soughing through those tall pines like invisible fingers plucking on Old Nick's harp. It sure was the lonesomest place I had ever been in; but the thought of Uncle Nate drove me on until I came to where the old Shaker graveyard runs down close to the road.

I'd forgotten the graveyard until just as I got up to it a white, shapeless figure jumped into the road and ran toward me, waving its arms.

Old Von Kluck did a turning movement before Paris; but he had nothing on me. I turned and, believe me, son, I went back to Uncle Nate's so fast I almost met myself coming away. I slid into the house like a dog that's just come from killing sheep and found the old gentleman asleep in his chair.

When he awoke he said I'd been a good boy not to disturb his nap, and he gave me a nickel, which surprised me so I almost refused it.

After that we were great pals, and I actually hated to leave him when the folks got home.

Cheer up, Ted, you'll like the school better before long, and try learning all your lessons instead of only part; you can fool a lot of teachers that way.

One thing more, don't write any doleful letters to your Ma just now. I'm planning a surprise trip with her to the White Mountains for our twenty-first wedding anniversary, and if you go butting in on her good time I'll tan you good. No, I won't, I'll stop your allowance for a month. That'll hurt worse.

Your affectionate father,

William Soule.

P. S.—I forgot to tell you the ghost I met by the graveyard was a half-wit who had escaped from Danvers in his nightshirt. They caught him the next morning, in a tree on the common, where he sat singing songs, thinking he was a canary.

Lynn, Mass.

September 30, 19—

Dear Ted:

So your roommate is a ham, is he? Well, if he is, you're in luck. Ham is selling for fifty cents a pound in Lynn and is going up.

Time was when ham was looked down upon as the poor man's meat, but now, when there are no poor except professional men and shoe manufacturers, his pigship has come into his own.

Seriously, Ted, I didn't care much for your last letter, it left a taste in my mouth like castor oil. I've got a pretty good idea of the appearance and general make-up of that "ham" of yours, and I'm laying myself a little bit of a