Lynn, Mass.
September 25, 19—
Dear Ted:
Your letter asking me if I think you are a failure at school, and wanting to know whether I can give you a job in the factory, came this morning.
"Yes," to the first, and, "I can but I won't" to the second. I didn't send you to Exeter to have you leave in a week; and as for the factory, I guess it can stagger along a couple of years more without you, although I sure do appreciate your wanting to work. It's so different from anything else you have ever wanted, and as Lew Dockstader once said, "Variety is the spice of vaudeville."
Sure, Exeter is a rotten place in the fall, when it rains eight days a week, and there's nothing except soggy leaves and mud everywhere, and a continuously weeping sky that's about as cheerful as the Germans at the peace table. You don't know any one well enough yet to say three words to, and your teachers seem to be playing a continual run of luck, by always calling on you for the part of the lesson you haven't learned.
Sure it's rotten; not Exeter, but what's the matter with you. It begins with an "h" and ends with a "k," but like other diseases, lockjaw excepted, and you'll never have that anyway, it's just as well to catch it young and get it over with.
Then, too, I guess you're beginning to realize that the leader of the Lynn High School Glee Club and left end of the football team isn't so big a frog, after all, when he gets into a puddle with five hundred other boys, most of whom never heard of Lynn.
Your learning this young is a blessing which you don't appreciate now. I had to wait until I took that trip to Binghamton with the Masons. I'd thought till then I was some pumpkins of a shoemaker grinding out eight thousand pairs a day, eleven with two shifts, but when I moseyed through Welt & Toplift's and saw them make fifty thousand pairs without batting an eye, I realized I had been looking at myself through the wrong end of the telescope.