kind o' enthusiastic, "well, then, the first thing you have to do is
learn how to sell corn salve. Any one that can sell corn salve can sell
anything. There's a farmhouse right over there, and I'll give you your
first lesson right now. Rummage around in that satchel there under the
seat and get me a tin box and some corn salve labels."

I found a lot of labels, and some boxes too. The labels was all
different sizes, but barring that they all looked about the same to me.
Whilst I was sizing them up he asts me agin was they any corn salve ones
in there.

"What colour label is it, Doctor Kirby?" I asts him. Fur they was blue
labels and white labels and pink labels.

He looks at me right queer. "Can't you read the labels?" he says, right
sharp.

"Well," I says, "I never been much of a reader when it comes to
different kind of medicines."

"Corn salve is spelled only one way," says he.

"That's right," I says, "and you'd think I orter be able to pick out a
common, ordinary thing like corn salve right off, wouldn't you?"

"Danny," he says, "you don't mean to tell me you can't read anything at
all?"

"I never told you nothing of the kind."

He picks out a label.

"If you can read so fast, what's that?" he asts.

She is a pink one. I thinks to myself; she either is corn salve or else
she ain't corn salve. And it ain't natcheral he will pick corn salve,
fur he would think I would say that first off. So I'm betting it ain't.
I takes a chancet on it.

"That," says I, "is mighty easy reading. That is Siwash Injun Sagraw." I
lost.

"It's corn salve," he says. "And Great Scott! They call this the
twentieth century!"

"I never called it that," says I, sort o' mad-like. Fur I was feeling
bad Doctor Kirby had found out I was such a ignoramus.

"Where ignorance is bliss," says he, "it is folly to be wise. But all
the same, I'm going to take your education in hand and make you drink of
life's Peruvian springs." Or some spring like that it was.

And the doctor, he done it. Looey said it wouldn't be no use learning to
read. He'd done a lot of reading, he said, and it never helped him none.
All he ever read showed him this feller Hamlet was right, he said, when
he wrote Shakespeare's works, and they wasn't much use in anything,
without you had a lot o' money. And they wasn't no chancet to get that
with all these here trusts around gobbling up everything and stomping
the poor man into the dirt, and they was lots of time