_Dear Kate_:
I am having a dandy time! This is an awful pretty place. It is kinda in
the country, yet it is right in the city. Captain Thomas Cassidy must
have been a very saving man, or else he didn't let many things get by
him, to be able to buy a nice little home like this. Yet, perhaps, he
bought it when this was real country, and cheap. The house has got a
parlor and a dining room and another room and a kitchen and a laundry
down stairs, and up stairs there are five bed rooms and a bath, and a
great big attic where Billy can play when it rains. There is a big yard,
both front and back. The front yard has flowers and belongs to Mrs.
Cassidy, and the back yard has a vegetable garden, and belongs to Jack
and Tom, half and half. You would laugh to see them two great big
babies quarreling over their vegetables. Tom comes home and takes off
his uniform and his collar and fusses around his garden every night. He
weeds and sweats and swears, and his garden ain't nothing like Jack's.
All Jack has to do is to look at a cabbage and it grows, and their poor
mother has an awful time keeping peace in the family. If they have
lettuce from Jack's garden, Jack says to her, "Mother, ain't that the
finest lettuce you ever et?" And Tom drops his knife and looks up sudden
at her, and she says careful-like, "It is awful good lettuce, Jacky bye,
but that we had yesterday was most as good," and then Tom goes on
eating. Jack has just finished his farm schooling, and he is dippy about
it. Onions is his graft. Why, he will talk about an onion for an hour.
He got me in a corner one day, and he talked about the money there was
in raising onions, how many bushels there was eaten in the world, and
how many thousands of bushels there was brought in from some place down
south, and the price of onions a bushel, and how many million could be
raised on an acre, well, my head whirled before he got through, and I
felt as if everybody had made a mistake by not turning the whole earth
into an onion farm. I said to him one day, "What are you studying
farming for, that don't pay? Why don't you go into the police like your
father and like Tom?" "Ah," he said, "who wants to walk up and down a
hot street all day and bat a drunk over the head or pinch a kid for
hooking a watermelon. I am going out in the country where I can see
things grow." His mother said, "He do be taking after my people. He is
just like me feyther, who always had to have his little bit of garden
and his pig." Here Jack started in again talking so fast you could
hardly understand him, he gets so excited and his eyes get bright and he
waves his hands around in the air--he is awful funny. Tom and his mother
set back in a chair and laugh at him, just like I did when he started on
pigs. He said, "Now for pigs, there is more money in pigs--" Just then
Tom hollered, "Choke him, Nan, choke him, if he gets started on pigs we
are done for. Onions is bad enough, but pigs is pigs." Jack gets awful
mad and hates to be laughed at, and his mother has to smooth him down.
She says to him running her hand soft up and down his coat sleeve,
"Never you mind, Jacky me bye, it is yourself that will be making the
family fortune one of these days, with your onions and your pigs." Tom
laughed and says, "Yes, if he feeds the onions to the pigs." But I think
Jack is right, and I hope some day he has a chance to get a farm, cause
it would be a shame for a person to love a thing the way he loves it,
and not be able to work at it. I asked him one day if he thought he
could make it pay, and he said, "Sure, don't the Italians and the
Chinamen out West make truck farming pay? The trouble with us is, we
don't go at it right. We go at it too big, and raise corn and oats and
barley instead of vegetables. Why, a farm near a big city like this, if
it was run right, ought to just coin money."
I am teaching, the boys to dance. You would kill yourself a laughing
watching them. After supper we push the kitchen table back, cause the
kitchen is a big old-fashioned kind, and Tom takes off his coat, because
he goes at it as if he was going to saw a load of lumber, and Jack runs
the phonograph and I try to teach Tom to dance, but you might just as
well teach an elephant to walk a tight rope. Tom is all feet. To begin
with, he is six feet two, and I come to about the second button on his
coat, and I have an awful time trying to get him around. He tries so
hard, he puckers his face all up in worried lines, and he sweats and he
breathes hard, and then when he gets through, he falls into a chair just
done up, mops his face and the back of his neck with a handkerchief or a
handy towel, and says, "Talk about work, why I would rather load a dray
all day." Then when he gets cooled off, he runs the phonograph for Jack.
Jack dances lovely. He is awful light on his feet. You don't have to
show him a step but once when he knows it, but he don't care much for
dancing, not half as much as Tom does, who would never learn the tango
if he lived a thousand years. But it is funny to see Tom. When Jack is a
dancing Tom will take an onion and go in front of Tom, holding it just
out of reach and moving just as Jack moves, as if he was trying to chase
the onion. When I say Jack is a good dancer, Tom says, "Sure, he is,
cause he thinks he is chasing an onion. Now if we only had a pig, no
tellin' what he'd do."
The one that can beat them all out is Mrs. Cassidy. At first she
wouldn't get up and try, and said, "The likes of an old woman like me
dancing around," but I gave her a great line of talk, told her how all
the old ladies was dancing, that if she went down to the restaurants
where I danced, she would see women old enough to be her grandmother,
having the time of their lives. First she wouldn't listen to it, and
said, "Gwan, they are trying to make a fool of me in my old age," but
finally I got her to try, and say, she done grand. Like all Irish girls,
she used to dance when she was young, and it all come back to her, and
she took to the new steps just natural. It was fun to see her. Her face
flushed, her eyes got bright, and she didn't seem to be old no more. Tom
and Jack were tickled to death. When she got through, they clapped their
hands, stamped their feet on the floor, just like the hoodlums do in the
gallery, when the hero rescues the maiden. Mrs. Cassidy flushed, was
half ashamed, and half tickled, and said she would never make a fool of
herself again, but she does and she likes it, and she and Jack can do
the hesitation waltz beautiful.
I mustn't write you any more, Kate. I am awful happy here. I think of
you all the time, and your letters are so good.
Yours,
_Nan_.