getting many new subscribers?
Just commenced, eh? Well, she wished you all the luck in the world.
How was your ma? That's good. Did she hear from your Uncle John's folks
since they moved out to Kansas?

I have heard that there were boys who, under the dire necessity of going
to the circus, got together enough rags, old iron, and bottles to make
up the price, sold 'em, collected the money, and went. I don't believe
it. I don't believe it. We all had, hidden under the back porch, our
treasure-heap of rusty grates, cracked fire-pots, broken griddles and
lid-lifters, tub-hoops and pokers, but I do not believe that any human
boy ever collected fifty cents' worth. I want you to understand that
fifty cents is a whole lot of money, particularly when it is laid out in
scrap-iron. Only the tin-wagon takes rags, and they pay in tinware,
and that's no good to a boy that wants to go to the circus. And as for
bottles--well, sir, you wash out a whole, whole lot of bottles, a whole
big lot of 'em, a wash-basket full, and tote 'em down to Mr. Case's
drug--and book-store, as much as ever you and your brother can wag, and
see what he gives you. It's simply scandalous. You have no idea of how
mean and stingy a man can be until you try to sell him old bottles. And
the cold-hearted way in which he will throw back ink-bottles that you
worked so hard to clean, and the ones that have reading blown into the
glass--Oh, it's enough to set you against business transactions all
your life long. There's something about bargain and sale that's mean and
censorious, finding this fault and finding that fault, and paying just
as little as ever they can. It gets on one's nerves. It really does.

The boys that made the little white spots come on the corners of their
jaws as they lay there in the grass, scheming, scheming, scheming,
planned rags, and bottles, and scrap-iron, and more also. Sometimes it
was a plan so much bigger that if they had kept it to themselves, like
the darkey's cow, they would have "all swole up and died."

"Sst! Come here once. Tell you sumpum. Now don't you go and blab it out,
now will you? Hope to die? Well.... Now, no kiddin'. Cross your heart?
Well.... Ah, you will, too. I know you. You go and tattle everything you
hear.... Well.... Cheese it! Here comes somebody. Make out we're talkin'
about sumpum else. Ah, he did, did he? What for, I wonder? (Say sumpum,
can't ye?) Why 'nu' ye say sumpum when he was goin' by? Now he'll
suspic