“My son, can’t you go ahead and give us the exhibition you promised us and for which we already have paid you in advance? These people have already been waiting more than an hour and a half for you to go up.”
“Father,” said my friend, “there’s a bunch of folks out in Burlington, Iowa, that have been waiting more’n eighteen months for me to go up.”
§ 188 Where Jimmy’s Education Really Was Shy
After a twenty years’ absence a gentleman returned to the little New England town where he had been born and where he spent his boyhood. In the neighborhood in which he had been reared he found but one of the original residents remaining, an elderly Irish lady. She welcomed him back home again, and they fell to talking of the boys and girls with whom he had grown up. Finally he asked:
“Tell me, Mrs. Daly, what ever became of poor little Jimmy McKenna who used to live in the shanty right down the street here?”
“Poor, is it?” echoed Mrs. Daly. “Poor nothin’! Jimmy McKenna had no schoolin’, as you may remember, but when he grew up he got into the truckin’ business and from that he turned to contractin’, and though he couldn’t read and write, he made a million.”
“Bully!” said the returned one. “And where is he now?”
“As to that,” said Mrs. Daly, “I couldn’t say. I hope, though, he’s in Heaven. You see, sor, here about two years ago, Jimmy went down to the gravel pit where some of the byes was in swimmin’, an’ it bein’ a warm day he took off his clothes and waded in, and he waded out too far and he got over his head and was drownded.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” said the visitor. “To think of a boy who had no better start than Jim McKenna had doing so well in the world, and then meeting an end like that! And he made a million, you say? And yet he couldn’t read nor write.”
“No,” said Mrs. Daly, “nor swim.”