There is going to be a dancing-school, and Dorry’s mother wants him to
go, and he says he guesses he shall, so he may know what to do when he
goes to parties, and his cousin Arthur, that doesn’t go to this school,
says ’t is bully when you’ve learned how. Please ask my grandmother if I
may go if I want to. Dorry wants me to if he does, he says, and Bubby
Short says he means to too, if we two do, if his mother’ll let him.
Dorry’s mother says we shall get very good manners there, and learn how
to walk into a room. I know how now to walk into a room, I told him,
walk right in. But he says his mother means to _enter_ a room, and
there’s more to it than walking right in. He don’t mean an empty room,
but company and all that. I guess I should be scared to go, the first of
it; I guess I should be bashful, but Dorry’s cousin says you get over
that when you’re used to it. Good many fellers are going. Mr. Augustus,
and Old Wonder Boy, and Mr. O’Shirk. Now I suppose you can’t think who
that is! Don’t you know that one I wrote about, that kicked and didn’t
pay, and that wouldn’t help water the course? The great boys picked out
that name for him, Mr. O’Shirk. The O stands for owe, and Shirk stands
for itself. I send home a map to my grandmother, I’ve just been making,
and I tried hard as I could to do it right, and I hope she will excuse
mistakes, for I never made one before. ’T is the United States. Old
Wonder Boy says he should thought I’d stretched out “Yankee Land” a
little bigger. He calls the New England States “Yankee Land.” And he
says they make a mighty poor show on the map. But Mr. Augustus told him
the brains of the whole country were kept in a little place up top, same
as in folks. So W. B. kept still till next time. Dorry said he’d heard
of folks going out of the world into Jersey. If I go to dancing-school,
I should like to have a bosom shirt, and quite a stylish bow. I think
I’m big enough, don’t you, for bosom shirts? I had perfect this forenoon
in all. I’ve lost that pair of spotted mittens, and I don’t know where,
I’m sure. I know I put them in my pocket. My hands get just as numb now
with cold! Seems as if things in my pockets got alive and jumped out. I
was clapping ’em and blowing ’em this morning, and that good, tiptop
Wedding Cake teacher told me to come in his house, and his wife found
some old gloves of his. I never saw a better lady than she is. When she
meets us she smiles and says, “How do you do, William Henry?” or Dorry,
or whatever boy it is. And when W. B. was sick one day she took care of
him. And she asks us to call and see her, and says she likes boys! Dorry
says he’s willing to wipe his feet till he wears a hole in the mat,
before he goes in her house. For she don’t keep eying your boots. Says
he has seen women brush up a feller’s mud right before his face and
eyes. My hair grows darker colored now. And my freckles have ’most faded
out the color of my face. I’m glad of it.
From your affectionate Nephew,