After a man has received two favors in succession, he begins to consider them part of his constitutional right.
“It may interest you to know,” writes Prof. Henry C. Cox, of The Froebel Public School, Chicago, “that on Christmas Eve sixteen hundred and sixty-seven children of this school sang one of your Christmas poems set to music.”
It not only interests us, but it makes us exceedingly vain. To live in the hearts of children! Who would swap them for the sages? And that reminds us of several bright things of children—neighbors of Trotwood—so bright that we thought once of sending them to the Ladies’ Home Journal, an awfully nice female paper published in Philadelphia, but we have decided they are good enough for Trotwood’s:
Little Octavine had lived upstairs at grandmother’s all her short life of four summers, and objected often to walking up the steps. Recently her parents moved to Nashville. Everybody knows what a beautiful Union Station Nashville has, but what an abominably long flight of steps leads from the tracks up to the street. Little Octavine slowly and painfully climbed them, and when she reached the top sighed and said, woefully: “Mamma, if you had told me Nashville was upstairs I never would have moved here.”
Little Ethel, aged two, who can barely talk, saw for the first time the Jersey cow chewing her cud the other day. Ethel watched her long and eagerly, but the more she yearned the more indifferent the cow chewed on. Finally she began to cry: “Mamma, make her let me—chew it—awhile!”
Henry’s mother had been operated on for appendicitis. He didn’t know exactly, but supposed there was an awful rent somewhere. One day he came in in time to see the nurse giving his mother a glass of water. “Don’t do that,” he shouted; “don’t do that! Don’t you know it will just run out of her?”
In reading some of the business letters on file in Trotwood’s the other day I came across a letter and its answer that made me catch my breath. When I reached the P. S. I had the same laugh that you will have—and as a laugh is always worth money, I am passing it on to Trotwood’s readers. The letter is from our friend, F. D. Hoogstraat, Ravenna, Mich., who, after saying many kind things about us and enclosing check for five subscribers to Trotwood’s, ends with the following friendly bit of fun: “I was out your way forty-odd years ago, and I killed as many of you as you did of me, and I feel now that every thing is square and even between us.”
I turned over the carbon copy containing the business manager’s reply, and this is what I read toward the latter part of the letter: “We will be glad to have you come this way again, and we’ll promise to give you a ‘warm reception,’ but not the kind we gave you before. The same Johnnies who tried to kill you forty years ago with bullets will try it again with kindness and moonshine whisky. They will charge you with a handshake instead of a bayonet and will put you in the best bed instead of a prison. The people of the South look forward and not backward, and have long ago forgotten and forgiven.