A recent letter from Michigan, written in lead pencil, and evidently
during hours when the writer should have been learning her geography
lesson, is very enthusiastic over the prospect of coming out here where
one girl can have a lover for every day in the week. She signs herself
Rosalinde, with a small r, and adds in a postscript that she “means
business.”
Yes, Rosalinde, that's what we are afraid of. We had a kind of a vague
fear that you meant business, so we did not reply to your letter. Wyoming
already has women enough who write with a lead pencil. We are also pretty
well provided with poor spellers, and we do not desire to ransack Michigan
for affectionate but sap-headed girls.
Stay in Michigan, Rosalinde, until we write to you, and one of these days
when you have been a mother eight or nine times, and as you stand in the
golden haze in the back yard, hanging out damp shirts on an uncertain
line, while your ripe and dewy mouth is stretched around a bass-wood
clothes pin, you will thank us for this advice.
Michigan is the place for you. It is the home of the Sweet Singer and the
abiding place of the Detroit _Free Press_. We can't throw any such
influences around you here as those you have at your own door.
Do not despair, Rosalinde. Some day a man, with a great, warm, manly heart
and a pair of red steers, will see you and love you, and he will take you
in his strong arms and protect you from the Michigan climate, just as
devotedly as any of our people here can. We do not wish to be
misunderstood in this matter. It is not as a lover that we have said so
much on the girl question, but in the domestic aid department, and when we
get a long letter from a young girl who eats slate pencils and reads Ouida
behind her atlas, we feel like going over there to Michigan with a trunk
strap and doing a little missionary work.
The Church Debt.
I have been thinking the matter over seriously and I have decided that if
I had my life to live over again, I would like to be an eccentric
millionaire.
I have eccentricity enough, but I cannot successfully push it without more
means.
I have a great many plans which I would like to carry out, in case I could
unite the two necessary elements for the production of the successful
eccentric millionaire.
Among other things, I would be willing to bind myself and give proper
security to any one who would put in money to offset my eccentricity, that
I would ultimately die. We all know how seldom the eccentric millionaire
now dies. I would be willing to inaugurate a reform in that direction.
I think now that I would endow a home for men whose wives are no longer
able to support them. In many cases the wife who was at first able to
support her husband comfortably, finally shoulders a church debt, and in
trying to lift that she overworks and impairs her health so that she
becomes an invalid, while hor husband is left to pine away in solitude or
dependent on the cold charities of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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