“How is Nora getting along?” I ventured to enquire.
“Married!” he snarled, and talked no more about that.
“What do you think about this opportunity, Martin?”
“Wouldn’t have missed it for fifty weddings!” he declared.
Throughout the year I received word from him, couched in various tempers of letters. Sometimes he was about to throw the whole ambition over, because as he wrote, his mind was not as fresh as it might be. Then he would write that the boys wanted him to become a member of the basket-ball team, but he had refused, because, he argued, so old a man, and so tall a one, would not do in playing against sixteen and eighteen-year-olds! In spring, he had trouble with his French. Then a complication of physical troubles cropped out, as if to test his patience. Finally, after being confined to his bed by illness, and having had to forego the final examinations, he decided that he was too old to keep at it, and that he had too many handicaps. He went to the West, thus keeping to his old intention, and after he had secured the position as “boss” of a large gang of men, on construction work, a “shirt-sleeved, and white collar job” as he termed it, he wrote to me the following letter.
“My dear Cousin:
“Don’t feel at all that you did me a bad turn by having me go to that school for a year. It was the most profitable investment I have ever made! I find that out more and more each day. It has released me, perhaps forever, from that miserable hand drudgery I always hated, for in that single year’s contact with polite speech, with teachers, and with the finer opportunities of life, I was given more confidence in myself and my opportunities. I am not afraid to approach educated people any more. I hold my head up higher; I feel myself more of a man. I can even write at the end of my letter, something impossible before, ‘Remunda de pasturaje hace becerros gordos,’ which is a Spanish proverb out here for, ‘Change of pasture makes fat calves!’ God bless our schools!”
The End
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.