And what if we had Alex McQuinn to write up the _Democrat_ again? Every
month we almost ruin ourselves at home buying all the magazines he
writes for; but when he was a fat young thing in spectacles hunting
locals and trying to write funny things for the _Democrat_, he wasn't
appreciated at all. Old Judge Hicks, who had no sense of humor, chased
him several miles once for telling how he tried to stop the 4:11 train
by yelling "Whoa" at it. And Editor Ayers had to fire Alex to keep the
peace.
When Rollin Derby, who draws pictures for your New York paper, went to
school, he could climb a tree by digging his bare toes into the rough
bark, but was not otherwise distinguished. When Maurice Gadby was a boy
in Homeburg, he went barefooted in summer with the rest of us, and who
could have guessed that he would grow up to give tango teas for your
four hundred and only allow the better quality of them to pay him
twenty-five dollars per cup at that? But the career that amuses me most
is Jack Nixon--"Shinner" Nixon, we used to call him. He commands a
battleship for a living now; and Homeburg is exactly seven miles from
the nearest stream that is navigable by a duck. We used to walk out to
that stream Saturday mornings, spend four hours building a dam and then
swim painfully on our elbows and knees in the puddle we had made until
dark, but Shinner wouldn't go in.
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