"In the first place it's out of date. And in the second place it's not respectable."
Then the hard-working locust, having rebuked the frivolous ants, went back to bed.
"A" AS IN "FATHER"
I
For two years life at Harvard was one long siesta to Orson Carver, 2d. And then he fell off the window-seat. Orson Carver, 1st, ordered him to wake up and get to work at once. Orson announced to his friends that he was leaving college to pay an extensive visit to "Carthage" and it sounded magnificent until he added, "in the Middle West."
A struggling young railroad had succumbed to hard times out there, and Orson senior had been appointed receiver. It was the Carthage, Thebes & Rome Railroad, connecting three towns whose names were larger than their populations.
Since Orson had seemed unable to decide what career to choose, if any, his father decided for him—decided that he should take up railroading and begin at the beginning, which was the office at Carthage. And Orson went West to "grow up young man with the country."
Carthage bore not the faintest resemblance to the moving-picture life of the West; he didn't see a single person on horseback. Yet his mother thought of him as one who had vanished into the Mojave desert. She wrote to warn him not to drink the alkali water.