Part 8

Now Hortense may be only six or eight years older than you. In wisdom she's nearly twenty, and you had better believe she's got no fool ideas about trying to live on three dollars a day, with sugar twenty cents a pound. No girl who's lived all her life in an academy town is so foolish as that, and if you think I'm going to finance you a couple of years from now, in a home of your own, you're taking off with the wrong foot.

I know I married when I was only twenty and was getting $18.00 a week, but your Ma is one woman in a million, a country town girl who was taught housekeeping from childhood, and who could make a dollar go further than even the immortal George, when he made his famous throw from deep center in the Potomac League. She could take my week's pay on a Saturday night, after having set aside the rent and insurance money, buy enough food for the next week, the clothes we needed, and still have some left to tuck away in the savings bank. And right here, let me tell you if you ever make another crack like you did two weeks ago, about your Ma wearing too many rings, I'll give you the worst licking you ever had. Perhaps she does, but she likes 'em, and when I think of the work those fingers have done for us, she's welcome to cover 'em with rings, if she likes, and her thumbs also for that matter.

Your Ma made me, and the right girl is the best inspirer of success a young fellow can have, while the wrong kind, is about as much help to a man trying to shin up the greased pole of success, as a nice thick coating of lard on his fingers.

Probably you don't remember John White. John and I were great pals when we were boys. Used to swim, play ball, and hunt together, fought at least one pitched battle a week, but when any one touched either of us, the other was on the intruder like a wildcat. We both got married about the same time, and John who was sensible as he could be in most things, picked out a girl who hadn't the brains of an intelligent guinea pig.

We were both working in Clough & Spinney's at the time, and three months after John was married, he had indigestion, and was wearing safety pins on his clothes instead of buttons.

Noon hours, he used to tell me what a lucky fellow he was to have married Priscilla, but as the weeks went by his praises seemed to lack the right ring, although I must say he did his best.

I often wondered how he was getting along, for in my estimation Priscilla Brown was pretty much of a lightweight, and although a nice enough girl, about as useful around a house, as one of those iron dogs some folks have on their front lawns. One day, John invited us over to Topsfield, where he lived, to supper. When we got there, I thought your Ma would have a fit. She's as orderly as a West Point Cadet, and there were clothes strewn all over John's parlor, and more dust on the furniture, than there is in some of the seashore lots the fly-by-night real estate companies sell.

We waited, and waited, and then waited some more for our supper. Finally, we had it, everything out of a can and cold, but the prize performance came when Priscilla started to serve jam and bread for dessert. She put down beside me, a loaf of bread she said she had just baked, and asked me to cut it. I tried. All I had was a knife. What I needed was a chisel. In my efforts to hack through the crust, the loaf slipped off the table and landed like a thousand bricks on my pet corn. I hollered right out, and made an enemy of Priscilla for life.

After supper, while Priscilla and your Ma were doing the dishes, John and I held a funeral in his back yard, and buried that loaf of bread beside a stone wall at the rear of the garden. A month later, old Josh Whipple who was near sighted, struck it while he was mending John's wall, and before he realized it wasn't a stone, he had slapped it into a hole in the wall with a lot of mortar. It stayed there until the next winter, when the weather finally destroyed it.

John had brains, and ambition, and was never an enemy of work, but to-day he is foreman of the making room in a measely little Maine factory, when he might be running his own, and it was only Priscilla who queered him. Whenever he'd manage to put by a little money, she always needed a new set of furs, or a vacation, or a thousand other things which she got. John never got his factory.

After all, I think I'm indebted to Hortense Shepard, for letting you spend most of your allowance on her, and clutter up her front porch on spring evenings. You might be spending your time and my money, in worse places. I'm not going to forbid you seeing her. What I am going to do is to ask you as man to man, if you don't think it would be fairer to the lady in question, not to propose until you have some visible means of support? Just think of the awful hole you'd be in, if you did, and she called your bluff and said, "Yes."

A school widow like Hortense, isn't a bad institution after all, for she gives a young man like you a chance to be in a love with a nice girl, even if she is old enough to be, let's say, his aunt. I'd ease off gradually, there, if I were you. I'm sure it won't keep her awake nights, if you call only once a week instead of five times. For no matter how much you may think she cares, she doesn't, any more than for any nice young fellow, who'll give her candy and flowers, and beau her around to the games.

After you've gone through school and college, and have been in the factory long enough to have faint glimmers of shoemaking, it'll be time enough to think of getting married. Now, I'd spend more time with the queens of history and less time with those of Exeter.

Don't take it too hard my boy, and remember that when the right time and right girl come along, the old man will be rooting tooth and nail for you to win.

Your affectionate father,

WILLIAM SOULE.

LYNN, MASS., _June 16, 19--_

DEAR TED:

Well son the school year is about over now and taking it all in all you haven't done so badly. Of course that probation mess last winter was not at all to my liking, and I could have survived the shock of a higher average of marks for the year, still I think you have given promises of better things to come.

When I asked you last Sunday what you intended doing this summer vacation, thinking you had planned hanging around home most of the time, I must say I was startled to learn the itinerary you had laid out for yourself. It looks as though you were going to be about as busy as the Prince of Wales was when he was visiting in New York, and he was busier than a one-armed paper hanger with St. Vitus dance.

Now I never believed in bringing you up on the all work and no play theory, but from the jobs you've set yourself I should judge you will be working harder at playing this summer than you ever did at anything else.

Newport, Narragansett, Magnolia, Kenneybunkport, and Bar Harbor are not exactly the places I should choose to get rested in for a coming year of work, but you are young and maybe you can stand it. Still I don't want you to make the mistake I did the year of the panic.

Nineteen seven was some year for me. Business was so jumpy I never knew when I came home at night whether the next day would bring the sheriff into the factory, or whether I might get a big order that would float me safely over the rocks. By June, I had lost thirty pounds and couldn't sleep nights, but the sheriff wore a disappointed look when I met him, and I didn't have to walk on the opposite sidewalk when I passed the Company's store in Boston.

Your Ma had been doing considerable worrying about my being overworked, and when I had pulled things around so that I could breathe again, she suggested a vacation. I agreed having in my mind a nice, quiet, little village on the Maine coast, where I could lie around in the sun and dose, or go fishing when I felt real rambunctious. Now your Ma, had just been reading a book called, "The Invigoration of the Human Mind and Body," by some fellow with a string of letters after his name.

Professor Wiseacre claimed that to get a thorough rest a person should spend his vacations in doing exactly the opposite from what he did the rest of the year, and as much as I should like to I can't quarrel with him about that, but what I am ready to go to the mat with him for, was his elaboration of this theory into the fact that if a person kept away from society most of the year, his vacation should be spent in the midst of its giddy whirl.

Your Ma was thoroughly sold on this idea, although I calculate she didn't have to be persuaded much harder than a shoe jobber does to take a thousand cases at present prices, when he thinks the market is going up.

I fell for it. Your Ma ordered a lot of sixty horse power clothes, and we rented a big cottage at Magnolia. Now I knew Magnolia was fashionable; but it's on the coast so I thought that once in a while I could slip away in a dory for a few hours' fishing off Norman's Woe, or get over to Gloucester for a chin with some of the captains of the fleet; but I soon found out that I had about as much chance of doing either as a rabbit has of dying of old age in the snake cage at the zoo.

The first morning, I came down in an old suit and flannel shirt, with a cod line in my pocket, carrying a can full of clams for bait. When your Ma saw me she waved me back like a traffic cop, and asked in a hurt tone if I had forgotten we were going to take our meals at the hotel. I had. I never did again. I changed into white flannels and stood around on the hotel piazza after breakfast saying, "Fine morning, Glad to meet you," while your Ma renewed her acquaintance with a number of ladies. About eleven, I tried to make a break, but learned I was to escort to the beach a crowd of females aged fifteen to seventy-five.

I sat on the beach for an hour getting my shoes full of sand, and then it was time to convey the crowd back to the hotel for lunch. Next, we went for an auto ride, stopping at the Grill for tea, after which it was time to dress for dinner, and then I had to stick around at a dance until after midnight.

I kept this up for two weeks, and the only time I escaped was one rainy day when I managed to dodge the hotel debating society, and get in a morning's fishing before it cleared up.

In two weeks, I was so fed up with changing my clothes, and going to the beach, and having tea, and hanging around dances, I just longed for the peaceful clatter of the making room, and would have done something desperate, if I hadn't met a young doctor who was making a great reputation advising people to do just what they wanted.

He told me I needed a complete change. I didn't put up any argument against that, and I sort of hinted the factory would be the most complete change I could think of; so he ordered me back to work and charged me a tremendous fee, but it was worth it, for in two weeks after I had returned, I felt rested.

Now I had rather hoped you and I would get a chance to pal around together this summer, for you will be away from home quite a lot during the next few years, and I want to be a real chum to you, Ted. I never had any use for the father and son business where the old man says, "Why, good morning Reginald," in a sort of a surprised tone as though he suddenly remembers he has a son after all. I want to be a real friend of yours, in on your good times, and ready to lend a hand whenever it's needed. In a few years I want to change the firm name from William Soule & Company to William Soule & Son, and I want it to be more than a change in the firm's name. I want it to be a real partnership.

We'll be glad to have you home again Ted, even if it's only between trips, for you've been missed this year, my boy. Your Ma and I aren't as young as we were, and there's been many an evening when I've been reading the paper, and she's been sewing, and neither of our minds on what we were doing, for we were thinking of a hulking kid of ours. Some years from now when you have a boy of your own you'll understand.

That's why, I guess, I hoped you'd be at home a lot this summer, and that later you and I could take a fishing trip together, but I promised you you could do anything within reason this vacation and my word has never been broken. We'll expect you Thursday.

Your affectionate father,

WILLIAM SOULE.

P. S. Bully for you, Ted. Your letter saying you are going to chuck all the fancy stuff and stay home this summer just came. You couldn't have pleased us more, and I've cabled old Indian Joe to save us two weeks in August. You and I are going to Newfoundland after salmon. Will we have a good time? I'll say so!

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

Numerous errors have been corrected and inconsistencies in spelling have been resolved; otherwise the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact.