Now, regarding that boat-paddling suit, and that baseball suit, and that
bathing suit, and that roller-rinktum suit, and that lawn-tennis suit,
mind, I don't care about the expense, because you say a young man can't
really educate himself thoroughly without them, but I wish you'd send
home what you get through with this fall and I'll wear them through the
winter under my other clothes. We have a good deal severer winters here
than we used to, or else I'm failing in bodily health. Last winter I
tried to go through without underclothes, the way I did when I was a
boy, but a Manitoba wave came down our way and picked me out of a crowd
with its eyes shet.
In your last letter you alluded to getting injured in a little "hazing
scuffle with a pelican from the rural districts." I don't want any harm
to come to you, my son, but if I went from the rural districts, and
another young gosling from the rural districts undertook to haze me, I
would meet him when the sun goes down, and I would swat him across the
back of the neck with a fence board, and then I would meander across the
pit of his stomach and put a blue forget-me-not under his eye.
Your father ain't much on Grecian mythology and how to get the square
root of a barrel of pork, but he wouldn't allow any educational
institutions to haze him with impunity. Perhaps you remember once when
you tried to haze your father a little, just to kill time, and how long
it took you to recover. Anybody that goes at it right can have a good
deal of fun with your father, but those who have sought to monkey with
him, just to break up the monotony of life, have most always succeeded
in finding what they sought.
I ain't much of a pensman, so you will have to excuse this letter. We
are all quite well, except old Fan, who has a galded shoulder, and hope
this will find you enjoying the same great blessing.
_Your Father._
ARCHIMEDES.
Archimedes, whose given name has been accidentally torn off and
swallowed up in oblivion, was born in Syracuse, 2,171 years ago last
spring. He was a philosopher and mathematical expert. During his life
he was never successfully stumped in figures. It ill befits me now,
standing by his new-made grave, to say aught of him that is not of
praise. We can only mourn his untimely death, and wonder which of our
little band of great men will be the next to go.
Archimedes was the first to originate and use the word "Eureka." It has
been successfully used very much lately, and as a result we have the
Eureka baking-powder, the Eureka suspender, the Eureka bed-bug buster,
the Eureka shirt, and the Eureka stomach bitters. Little did Archimedes
wot, when he invented this term, that it would come into such general
use.
Its origin has been explained before, but it would not be out of place
here for me to tell it as I call it to mind now, looking back over
Archie's eventful life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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