Well, now Jimmy has disappeared and I will just note that I am perfectly shocked at his way of talking, but Pa and Levey Cohen both says he is a diamond in the rough, and I do hope they can polish off some of the rough corners soon. Pa has always wanted to take just such a character and tame him. Now he has got the raw material and I shall be waiting anxiously to see what comes up next. Uncle Smith is coming soon and I expect when he sees the boy Jimmy—well, Uncle Smith will say words I won’t write. I can hear that Jimmy talking yet with the gardener, that is, Jimmy is talking and the gardener just listening. I will put down what I can hear: “Say, Harvard College is a swell place I guess. I have read in de papers dis mornin’ dat dey want twenty million dollars to make de place solid. Gee whiz! what do dey do wid all de money dey gets? I know a lot of dem Harvard fellows; in New York dey always gives a fellow a few extra pennies and dinner, on holidays. I likes dem Harvard fellows ’cause dey has got a generous vein in der hand. Guess dey are taught to be generous to us kids in college, dat’s why dey need so much money to carry dem along. Say, wouldn’t you like to get your lamps on twenty million dollars all in one bunch? Don’t it make ye faint to think of it? Gives me a hungry pain in de left side of me liver. Say, Mr. Gardner, dat waking suit of yourn (scuse me for saying so) in New York would be called loud enough for a talking machine reckord. Say, I’se got a best girl, I has. She’s a cracker jack; she’s got the beautifullest hair yer ever saw. It’s a high-toned shade; they call it ashes and roses, but I don’t see why, but they do. Her eyes are violet, oh, so find. Hully gee! but they snap when she gits mad. She boxed my ears one day ’cause I tried to kiss her. She got awful mad and threw a wash-tub at my head, but I dodged it and it went plunk into a big policeman who was stooping down to look into a barroom window. Peg said it served him right for snooping, but she run like anything and so did I, and when de policeman got up we war way off. He took de wash-tub wid him, but no one saw any one fire it, so it was never reclaimed. Peg said the tub cost a dollar and twenty-five cents and if she claimed it, why, she was likely to get pinched, and get thirty days, so she said the policeman was welcome to de tub; said she bet a button de next time dat policeman stooped down to look at anything he would hire a man to watch behind him. Oh, I tell you what, de papers are all de time having excitement. Why don’t all de people go to Sunday school and be good? If dey would de papers would be put out of biz. Dey are watching all de time for de man or womans dat do wicked. All de good ones are never spoken of except when dey die, and den only a few lines way back in de paper in small print, but let a man give a lot of money like some fellows rocks I heard of, and dey will put de heading in capital letters, a little bigger den de common readin’, den you notice dat de oil we use to feed our lamps on goes up, perhaps only a quarter of a cent, but if you can get a few billion quarter of cents together all to once it would buy a good many turkeys for Thanksgiving. Say, mister, Christmas and Thanksgiving are de only two days in de year I can git full. Naw, I don’t mean full of liquor. (I never drink anyting but milk and cold water.) I mean get full of grub, wid all de good tings de rich people has. Wouldn’t I like to be rich? No, I don’t tink money is all dare is, but it is a whole lot to fill in wid. A pocket full of greenbacks would make me feel better than a pocket full of emptiness with a big appetite. Say, mister, I can sing and dance to beat the cars. I singed ‘De Pride of Newspaper Row,’ last winter in New York and I got an applecore to sing another verse. Ought to be encore? They said I did fine. Say, mister, if you saw an automobile coming down the street at sixty miles an hour and a deaf man crossing the street, what’s the answer? Not yet, but soon! Did you hear about the new Irishman over to East Boston last week? Well, Mike McCarthy told me about it. He said he and Pat Murphy was working on Mr. Smith’s house, the one that married Mary Jones, of Salem, and Pat was working on the roof when all of a sudden the staging broke and Pat slipped and slid, till at the very edge he caught on to the tin gutter and hung in the air, six stories from the ground. Mike and the other yelled to Pat to hold on till they got something to catch him in.