Remember that you are the only boy we've got, and we are only going
through the motions of living here for your sake. For us the day is
wearing out, and it is now way long into the shank of the evening. All we
ask of you is to improve on the old people. You can see where I fooled
myself, and you can do better. Read and write, and sifer, and polo, and
get nolledge, and try not to be ashamed of your uncultivated parents.
When you get that checkered little sawed-off coat on, and that pair of
knee panties, and that poker-dot necktie, and the sassy little boys holler
“rats” when you pass by, and your heart is bowed down, remember that, no
matter how foolish you may look, your parents will never sour on you.
Your Father.
Twombley's Tale.
My name is Twombley, G.O.P. Twombley is my full name and I have had a
checkered career. I thought it would be best to have my career checked
right through, so I did so.
My home is in the Wasatch Mountains. Far up, where I can see the long,
green, winding valley of the Jordan, like a glorious panorama below me, I
dwell. I keep a large herd of Angora goats. That is my business. The
Angora goat is a beautiful animal--in a picture. But out of a picture he
has a style of perspiration that invites adverse criticism.
Still, it is an independent life, and one that has its advantages, too.
When I first came to Utah, I saw one day, in Salt Lake City, a young girl
arrive. She was in the heyday of life, but she couldn't talk our language.
Her face was oval; rather longer than it was wide, I noticed, and, though
she was still young, there were traces of care and other foreign
substances plainly written there.
She was an emigrant, about seventeen years of age, and, though she had
been in Salt Lake City an hour and a half, she was still unmarried.
She was about the medium height, with blue eyes, that somehow, as you
examined them carefully in the full, ruddy light of a glorious September
afternoon, seemed to resemble each other. Both of them were that way,
I know not what gave me the courage, but I stepped to her side, and in a
low voice told her of my love and asked her to be mine.
She looked askance at me. Nobody ever did that to me before and lived to
tell the tale. But her sex made me overlook it. Had she been any other sex
that I can think of, I would have resented it. But I would not strike a
woman, especially when I had not been married to her and had no right to
do so.
I turned on my heel and I went away. I most always turn on my heel when I
go away. If I did not turn on my own heel when I went away, whose heel
would a lonely man like me turn upon?
Years rolled by. I did nothing to prevent it. Still that face came to me
in my lonely hut far up in the mountains. That look still rankled in my
memory. Before that my memory had been all right. Nothing had ever rankled
in it very much. Let the careless reader who never had his memory rankle
in hot weather, pass this by. This story is not for him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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