After this, they were the best of friends. Every evening the pot appeared, and while the seamstress drank from it at her window, Mr. Smith drank from its twin at his; and notes were exchanged as rapidly as Mr. Smith’s early education permitted. They told each other their histories, and Mr. Smith’s was one of travel and variety, which he seemed to consider quite a matter of course. He had followed the sea, he had farmed, he had been a logger and a hunter in the Maine woods. Now he was foreman of an East River lumber yard, and he was prospering. In a year or two he would have enough laid by to go home to Bucksport and buy a share in a ship-building business. All this dribbled out in the course of a jerky but variegated correspondence, in which autobiographic details were mixed with reflections, moral and philosophical.
A few samples will give an idea of Mr. Smith’s style:
i was one trip to van demens
land
To which the seamstress replied:
It must have been very interesting.
But Mr. Smith disposed of this subject very briefly:
it wornt
Further he vouchsafed:
i seen a chinese cook in hong kong could cook flapjacks like your Mother