My dear Son.--Your letter of last week reached us yesterday, and I
enclose $13, which is all I have by me at the present time. I may sell
the other shote next week and make up the balance of what you wanted.
I will probably have to wear the old buffalo overcoat to meetings
again this winter, but that don't matter so long as you are getting an
education.
I hope you will get your education as cheap as you can, for it cramps
your mother and me like Sam Hill to put up the money. Mind you, I don't
complain. I knew education come high, but I didn't know the clothes cost
so like sixty.
I want you to be so that you can go anywhere and spell the hardest word.
I want you to be able to go among the Romans or the Medes and Persians
and talk to any of them in their own native tongue.
I never had any advantages when I was a boy, but your mother and I
decided that we would sock you full of knowledge, if your liver held
out, regardless of expense. We calculate to do it, only we want you to
go as slow on swallow-tail coats as possible till we can sell our hay.
[Illustration: 0042]
Now, regarding that boat-paddling suit, and that baseball suit, and that
bathing suit, and that roller-rinktum suit, and that lawn-tennis suit,
mind, I don't care about the expense, because you say a young man can't
really educate himself thoroughly without them, but I wish you'd send
home what you get through with this fall and I'll wear them through the
winter under my other clothes. We have a good deal severer winters here
than we used to, or else I'm failing in bodily health. Last winter I
tried to go through without underclothes, the way I did when I was a
boy, but a Manitoba wave came down our way and picked me out of a crowd
with its eyes shet.
In your last letter you alluded to getting injured in a little "hazing
scuffle with a pelican from the rural districts." I don't want any harm
to come to you, my son, but if I went from the rural districts, and
another young gosling from the rural districts undertook to haze me, I
would meet him when the sun goes down, and I would swat him across the
back of the neck with a fence board, and then I would meander across the
pit of his stomach and put a blue forget-me-not under his eye.
Your father ain't much on Grecian mythology and how to get the square
root of a barrel of pork, but he wouldn't allow any educational
institutions to haze him with impunity. Perhaps you remember once when
you tried to haze your father a little, just to kill time, and how long
it took you to recover. Anybody that goes at it right can have a good
deal of fun with your father, but those who have sought to monkey with
him, just to break up the monotony of life, have most always succeeded
in finding what they sought.
I ain't much of a pensman, so you will have to excuse this letter. We
are all quite well, except old Fan, who has a galded shoulder, and hope
this will find you enjoying the same great blessing.
_Your Father._