Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/159

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
HOW LITTLE ARCADY WAS UPLIFTED
141

ness of Home," and "Marriage—Happiness or Woe may come of It."

Again, Westley Keyts could read how to cut up meats. He knew already, but this chapter, illustrated with neat carcasses marked off into numbered squares, convinced him that the book was not so light as some of its other chapters indicated, and determined him to its purchase.

And there were letters for every conceivable emergency. "To a Young Man who has quarrelled with his Master," "Dismissing a Teacher," "Inquiry for Lost Baggage," "With a Basket of Fruit to an Invalid," and "To a Gentleman elected to Congress." Rare indeed, in our earth life, would be the crisis unmet by this treasury of knowledge. Not only was there an elevation of tone in our correspondence that winter, resulting from the persuasive activities of Mrs. Potts, but our writing became decorative with flourishes in "the muscular" and "whole-arm" movements. We learned to draw flying birds and bounding deer and floating swans with scrolls in their beaks, all without lifting pen from paper. Some of us learned to do it almost as well as the accomplished Mr. Gaskell himself, and almost all of us showed marked improvement in penmanship. Doubtless Truman Baird did not, he being engrossed with oratory, striving to reproduce, "Hate—the right foot advanced, the face turned to the sky, the gaze directed upward with a fierce expression, the eyes full of a baleful light," or other phases of passion duly