was young--he was a lot growed up. I expect he knew sorrow early. Both of us was quite silent. “I didn’t know they didn’t know,” says Edmund, like he was breaking the news of a death to y’u. And I lays right down again on the sacks. “Good Lord!” says Edmund, “what ignorance. The capital of their country!” But I could only fight for my breath, and cry and cry. Next time I could see anything, there was Edmund sittin’ on the counter clost alongside of me, legs danglin’ against the sacks. But that time when I looked at him he laughed--laughed all through fit to kill himself, same as I’d been doin’. And it was at himself, y’u know, as well as at the whole thing; he included himself in the show. “You’re quite right,” says he. That was what made y’u love Edmund. When a thing like Washington, D.C., came up, he’d most always get it wrong first--see the bad side of it too big and the good side too small--he had a heap of misplaced seriousness in his system to conquer. But he’d sure conquer it every time if y’u gave him time. It took me the whole first week I worked for him in the store to find this out. Edmund was the squarest man I have ever known. Too square. And about the finest. He was from an Eastern college and entirely wasted on the Thowmet Valley, where nobody but him had any education or understood honesty as he understood it. “But they’re obstacles to the public good here, all the same,” said he next; and I had to think back before I saw he meant the old men was obstructin’ the school-house and thereby withholdin’ light from the young hope of the great empire of the Northwest. He came back to it too, several days after that, while the school-teacher was orderin’ slate-pencils. “Oh, leave them alone,” says she. “Mr. Edmund, you’ll just make ’em worse.” But he was in for an argument. He settled those eyes of his on her with his regular May-God-have-mercy-on-your-soul expression, and he told her she’d ought to know better. But she didn’t mind him any more’n I did. She liked him. “You know as well as I do,” says he, “that children should be an improvement on their parents, especially when those parents come from Texas. Texas is a large place,” he goes on, “and I am willin’ to believe that it contains thousands of enlightened and refined persons--but they don’t come here. If your scholars don’t learn to read and write, where’s any progress to come from?” “Well, Mr. Edmund,” says she, “all I know is that you will never help me, or the school-house, or progress, by calling Kultus Jake and Frisco Baldy a pair of inspected and condemned mules to their faces.”