The best short stories of 1922, and the yearbook of the American short story
General
The best short stories of 1922, and the yearbook of the American short story
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories -- 20th century -- Bibliography; Short stories -- 20th century -- Indexes; Short stories, American
Well, anyway, they come over to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding
and it was pretty crimpy weather and the furnace don’t seem to heat
up no more like it used to and Mother made the remark that she hoped
this winter wouldn’t be as cold as the last, referring to the winter
previous. So Edie said if she was us, and nothing to keep us home,
she certainly wouldn’t spend no more winters up here and why didn’t
we just shut off the water and close up the house and go down to
Tampa, Florida? You know we was there four winters ago and staid five
weeks, but it cost us over three hundred and fifty dollars for hotel
bill alone. So Mother said we wasn’t going no place to be robbed. So
my son-in-law spoke up and said that Tampa wasn’t the only place in
the South, and besides we didn’t have to stop at no high price hotel
but could rent us a couple rooms and board out somewheres, and he had
heard that St. Petersburg, Florida, was _the_ spot and if we said the
word he would write down there and make inquiries.
Well, to make a long story short, we decided to do it and Edie said
it would be our Golden Honeymoon and for a present my son-in-law
paid the difference between a section and a compartment so as we
could have a compartment and have more privatecy. In a compartment
you have an upper and lower berth just like the regular sleeper, but
it is a shut in room by itself and got a wash bowl. The car we went
in was all compartments and no regular berths at all. It was all
compartments.
We went to Trenton the night before and staid at my daughter and
son-in-law and we left Trenton the next afternoon at 3.23 P. M.
This was the twelfth day of January. Mother set facing the front of
the train, as it makes her giddy to ride backwards. I set facing her,
which does not affect me. We reached North Philadelphia at 4.03 P. M.
and we reached West Philadelphia at 4.14, but did not go into Broad
Street. We reached Baltimore at 6.30 and Washington, D.C., at 7.25.
Our train laid over in Washington two hours till another train come
along to pick us up and I got out and strolled up the platform and
into the Union Station. When I come back, our car had been switched
on to another track, but I remembered the name of it, the La Belle,
as I had once visited my aunt out in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where
there was a lake of that name, so I had no difficulty in getting
located. But Mother had nearly fretted herself sick for fear I would
be left.
“Well,” I said, “I would of followed you on the next train.”
“You couldn’t of,” said Mother, and she pointed out that she had the
money.
“Well,” I said, “we are in Washington and I could of borrowed from
the United States Treasury. I would of pretended I was an Englishman.”
Mother caught the point and laughed heartily.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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