I'm glad your gout is better, father, it will not pain you so much when I try to--but I know you hate slang.
P.S. Milligan talks a good deal about me around the office. He said this afternoon he expected that some day I'd discharge him. Thus do coming events cast their shadows before.
_How an Elder's conscience was amused at a church fair, the folly of telling a wife the truth, are among Pierrepont's topics._
I am sending this letter to you, special delivery, care of the New York branch, that you may feel that you are welcomed home. Although you have been abroad but a few weeks, I know that you will be glad to set foot on American soil once more. I wish I could be on hand to meet you and help sing "The Star Spangled," but I want to stay here and keep an eye on Milligan. In my absence he would be very likely to try and queer my record.
It's a great pleasure to find from your last that you don't give a rag for the bulls on pork, because when I heard that they were going to have your heart's blood and make you squeal louder than any hog you ever assassinated, it just naturally made me feel a bit uneasy. I don't want to see the Graham money go flying on flyers, and ever since you showed me the error of my ways in dabbling in the Open Board, I thought that you, too, must have reformed. However, if you have got the bulls by their tails and can twist 'em till the critters bellow again, I'll forgive your little lapse from righteousness.
But, somehow, I can't help thinking of old Elder Blivins, of the little New Hampshire town where we used to go summers before you got very rich. You remember the Elder,--a tall, thin man, with a conscience as highly developed as dyspepsia. Well, one Sunday he preached a mighty powerful sermon on gambling, and the way he did sock it at the sinners made my young blood run cold. There happened to be several summer visitors in his congregation that day, among 'em Colonel Porter, a big stock-broker of Boston, but that only inflamed the Elder all the more. He declared that the stock market was run by the devil in person, and that every man who took part in those hideous games of chance was predestinedly and teetotally damned. It was a scorcher, and the deacons congratulated him so heartily after the service that he naturally looked for a fifty-dollar raise in his salary, which was just then running more to potatoes than his needs seem to warrant. Colonel Porter looked a little hot under the frying, but he didn't make a fool of himself by going out.