That wasn’t an easy letter to write, as Sam discovered later when, with the assistance of his mother and sister, he set about its composition. Nell, a pretty girl a year older than Sam, scored his first draft indignantly.
“Why, you haven’t said a thing about what you can do,” she exclaimed. “You’ve just told him what you can’t! The idea of saying that you’re a fair swimmer! You know very well, Sam, that you’re a perfect wonder in the water.”
“Pshaw, lots of fellows can swim better than I do.”
“No one around here, anyway. And you practically tell him that you don’t know a thing about looking after young boys.”
“I don’t!”
“But you don’t have to say so, do you? Now, you write that all over and—I tell you what, Sam! Write it just as if you were trying to get the place for someone else!”
Finally both Nell and Mrs. Craig approved, and Sam made a clean copy of the letter, slipped it into an envelope, stamped and addressed it, and went out to the mail box with it so it would be gathered up at eleven-thirty and go off on the early morning train. Now that he had made up his mind to get the position if he could he was impatient to learn his fate.
But three days passed without any response and he had begun to think that nothing was to come of his application, when one afternoon a messenger boy brought a telegram. It was extremely brief.
“Mail references immediately. Langham.”
“It doesn’t look as though he thought you too young,” said Tom when, later, Sam dropped in at Cummings and Wright’s to tell the news. “If he did he wouldn’t bother with your references. I guess you’ve got it, Sam.”