BEVERLEY.
BEN DOOLITTLE TO BEVERLEY SANDS
January 11.
DEAR BEVERLEY:
The letters are filed away with their predecessors.
If I am any judge of human nature, you will receive others from this daughter of the South in the same strain.
If her great father (local meaning, old dad) is really dead, he probably sawed his head off against a tight clothes-line in the back-yard some dark night, while on his way to their gooseberry bushes to see if they had any sense.
More likely he hurled himself headlong into eternity to get rid of her—rolled down the steps with sheer delight and reached for pneumonia with a glad hand to escape his own offspring and her endless society.
The most terrifying thing to me about this new Clara is her Great Desert dryness; no drop of humour ever bedewed her mind. I believe those eminent gentlemen who call themselves biologists have recently discovered that the human system, if deprived of water, will convert part of its dry food into water.
I wish these gentlemen would study the contrariwise case of Clara: she would convert a drink of water into a mouthful of sawdust.