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 aint 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.
[Illustration: RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE.]
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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