Your affectionate father, JOHN GRAHAM. +-----------------------------+ | No. 6 | +-----------------------------+ | From John Graham, en route | | to Texas, to Pierrepont | | Graham, care of Graham & | | Co., Union Stock Yards, | | Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont | | has, entirely without | | intention, caused a little | | confusion in the mails, | | and it has come to his | | father's notice in the | | course of business. | +-----------------------------+ VI PRIVATE CAR PARNASSUS, Aug. 15, 189- _Dear Pierrepont:_ Perhaps it's just as well that I had to hurry last night to make my train, and so had no time to tell you some things that are laying mighty heavy on my mind this morning. Jim Donnelly, of the Donnelly Provision Company, came into the office in the afternoon, with a fool grin on his fat face, to tell me that while he appreciated a note which he had just received in one of the firm's envelopes, beginning "Dearest," and containing an invitation to the theatre to-morrow night, it didn't seem to have any real bearing on his claim for shortage on the last carload of sweet pickled hams he had bought from us. Of course, I sent for Milligan and went for him pretty rough for having a mailing clerk so no-account as to be writing personal letters in office hours, and such a blunderer as to mix them up with the firm's correspondence. Milligan just stood there like a dumb Irishman and let me get through and go back and cuss him out all over again, with some trimmings that I had forgotten the first time, before he told me that you were the fellow who had made the bull. Naturally, I felt pretty foolish, and, while I tried to pass it off with something about your still being green and raw, the ice was mighty thin, and you had the old man running tiddledies. It didn't make me feel any sweeter about the matter to hear that when Milligan went for you, and asked what you supposed Donnelly would think of that sort of business, you told him to "consider the feelings of the girl who got our brutal refusal to allow a claim for a few hundredweight of hams." I haven't any special objection to your writing to girls and telling them that they are the real sugar-cured article, for, after all, if you overdo it, it's your breach-of-promise suit, but you must write before eight or after six. I have bought the stretch between those hours. Your time is money--my money--and when you take half an hour of it for your own purposes, that is just a petty form of petty larceny.