It seems that his brother in Oregon had run out of yellow envelopes, and had filled the one with the black border unusually full of convulsive mirth.
What a world of bitter disappointment this is anyhow!
Then there is the woman who playfully stands at the general delivery window, and gleefully sticks her fangs out into the subsequent week, and skittishly chides the clerk because he doesn't get her a letter, and he good naturedly tells her as he has done daily for seven years, that he will write her one to-morrow.
Then she reluctantly goes home to get rested so that she can come again and stand there the next day.
Then comes the literary cuss, who takes a weekly paper from Vermont with a patent inside to it. He reads it with the purest unselfishness to me, and points out the fresh, new-laid jokes that one always finds in the enterprising paper with the patent digestion.
He also explains the jokes to me, so that I need not grope along through life in hopeless ignorance of what is going on all about me.
There is a woman, too, who comes to the window and lavishly buys a three-cent stamp, and runs out her tongue, and hangs it over the stamp clerk's shoulder, and lays the stamp back against the glottis and moistens it, and has to run her skinny finger down her turkey gobbler neck to rescue it, and then she pastes it on the upper left-hand corner of the envelope, and asks the clerk to be sure and see that it goes. She then thoughtfully tells him who it is to go to, and gives a short biography of the sendee.
There can be no doubt that some women are more capable of doing certain kinds of business than men are. All classes of business requiring careful and minute explanations and concise and exhaustive directions can be better attended to by this class of women.
They enter joyfully upon the task of shedding collateral information in a way that would appall a man, and when they confide in you, you know that they are not keeping anything back. You almost wish sometimes that they would keep back a little of it and not rob themselvss.
Still, perhaps it is better that this class of women is not trusted with any great amount of business, for life is so brief, so evanescent, and so transitory.