“Yours,
”Jim.
“P. S.—Coming in, I saw a group of children dancing on a bridge, close to a schoolhouse, down near the Mississippi. I guess no one but myself knew what they were doing; but I recognized our old ‘Weevilly Wheat’ dance. I could imagine the ancient Scotch air, which the noise of the train kept me from hearing, and the old words you and I used to sing, dancing on the Elk Creek bridge:
“‘We want no more of your weevilly wheat,
We want no more your barley;
But we want some of your good old wheat,
To make a cake for Charley!’
“You remember it all! How we used to swing the little girls around, and when we remembered it afterwards, how we would float off into realms of blissful companionship with freckled, short-skirted, bare-legged angels! Things were simpler then, Al, weren’t they? And to emphasize that fact, my mind ran along the trail of the ‘Weevilly Wheat’ into the domain of tickers, margins, puts and calls, and all the cussedness of the Board of Trade, and came bump against poor Bill’s bucket-shop deals, and settled down to the chronic wonder as to just how badly crippled he was when he died. If Will gets it figured out soon, at all accurately, wire me.
“J.”
The wedding tour came to an end, and the bride and groom returned long before Mr. Elkins did. Giddings dropped into my office the day after their return, and, quite in his old way, began to discuss affairs in general.
“I’m going to close out the Herald Addition,” said he. “Real estate and newspaper work don’t mix, and I shall unload the real estate. What do you say to an auction?”
“How can you be sure of anything like an adequate scale of prices?” said I; “and won’t you demoralize things?”
“It’ll strengthen prices,” he replied, “the way I’ll manage it. This is the age of the sensational—the yellow—and you people haven’t been yellow enough in your methods of selling dirt. If you say sensationalism is immoral, I won’t dispute it, but just simply ask how the fact happens to be material?”
I saw that he was going out of his way to say this, and avoided discussion by asking him to particularize as to his methods.