With Our Writers
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
As a rule, traveling salesmen manage to extract and radiate as much joy and mirth as any class of citizens that I know of. But even these genial spirits have their own sorrows.
A drummer was sent by his house, shortly after his marriage, on a long trip to the Pacific coast. Some time after his departure the young wife was seized with appendicitis, was hurried off to a hospital, operated on, and recovered all right. The strain, both mental and financial, had been great, but she was well again. Joe had remitted by check for surgeon’s fee, special nurse, hospital charges, and a few other items amounting to a hundred or so, and his spirits were just beginning to rise again as he worked towards Los Angeles, where mail from home would await him.
The “gang” from the 9:10 train hurried up to the office of the “Link-Schmidt.” The night clerk handed each his quota of these ever-welcome missives.
In the reading room Joe was seen to turn deathly pale. Several at once approached. “What’s matter, old boy?” “Bad news from home?” “Anything out of whack?” and kindred interrogatories were fired at him from all directions.
Some griefs are too poignant for expression. Carefully folding back the first and last parts of a page, Joe exhibited, without comment, only this paragraph of its perfumed surface: “I am not feeling as well, dearest, as when I wrote you at Pasadena. Sallie is coming over to-morrow and we are going to have our kimonos cut out.”
Reader number one passed it down the line. Silence, that was stifling, settled over the group. Then, moved by a common impulse, a solemn procession filed out and lined up before a rosewood counter, in front of which ran a massive gilt rail. “Martini,” “Black and White High Ball,” “Wilson,” “Same.” In the land of the high ball a poet once sang:
“Inspiring, bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou can make us scorn!
Wi’ tu’penny we fear nae evil;
Wi’ whiskey straight we’d face the divil.”
It was so in this instance. Joe came to first. “Ain’t that ——” (from the youngest in the bunch). “Say, Joe, the repair bills of you married men must be something fierce.”
“Oh, come on, boys, let’s go to supper.”
H. K. A.