"'Good-bye, my children, God bless you.'
"He had two children, which for a man of low social worth was doing quite well. But on the other hand he was improvident enough to leave his children without a mother. When I was at college, my instructor in rhetoric was always saying that my failure to write well was due to the fact that I had nothing to say; and he used to quote passages from Isaiah to show how the thing should be done. I think my rhetoric teacher would have approved of Charles Crawl's epistolary style. I think Isaiah would have."
"But we can't all of us work in the mines," I said.
"Therefore it is not to you that America is looking for the development of an epistolary art," said Cooper; "an art in which we are bound to take first place long before our coal deposits are exhausted. Charles Crawl had his predecessors. In November, 1909, Samuel Howard was thoughtless enough to let himself be killed, with several hundred others, in the St. Paul's mine at Cherry, Illinois. He, too, left a letter behind him. He wrote:
"If I am dead, give my diamond ring to Mamie Robinson. The ring is at the post-office. I had it sent there. The only thing I regret is my brother that could help mother out after I am dead and gone. I tried my best to get out and could not.
"You see, being a low-income man, of small social worth and pitifully inefficient, even when he did his best to get out, he could not. But perhaps the subject tires you?"
"You might as well go on," said Harding. "If you finish with this subject you will have some other grievance."
"I have only two more examples of the vulgar epistolary style to cite," said Cooper. "Strictly speaking one of them is not a letter. But it is to the point. On the night of April 14, 1912, an Irishman named Dillon of low social value, in fact a stoker, happened to be swimming in the North Atlantic. The Titanic had just sunk from beneath his feet. But perhaps I had better quote the testimony before the Mersey Commission, which, being an official communication, is necessarily unanswerable, as the late Sir W. S. Gilbert pointed out:
"Then he [Dillon] swam away from the noise and came across Johnny Bannon on a grating—
"From the fact that Johnny Bannon had managed to possess himself of a grating we are justified in concluding that he was a man of somewhat higher social worth than the witness, Dillon. However,