The Laurens Advertiser

A FATHER'S LETTER,

Some Paternal Counsel Given in a Very Original Manner.

(Bill Nye in The Graphic News.)

My Dear Son--Your letter of last week found your mother and me fairly well, though I can see that I ain't the same man I used to be by any means. Every Spring I have trouble with my lungs. One of my lungs is entirely gone, and the other one is hepatized, so the doctor tells me. I've tried most everything in the way of medicine for to renew my lungs, but they get worse and worse all the time. But still I eat a good hearty meal of victuals. You refer casually, in your letter, to a misspelled word in my last communication.

You speak of grammar also in a reproachful way, which is annoying to a man like me. I am not great on the spell. I admit, Henry, for when I ought to been learning for to spell at the spelling schools and great orthographical retorts of our section of country, I was licking the smart Alecks from town that seemed to be smarter than their parents.

No, Henry, I never got a medal for spelling long hard words with great fluency, but I've tried to be a well-behaved parent. In my poor weak way I've aimed to be a good father to you, Henry, and so has your mother. I think I may say, with pardonable pride, that I have been more successful in that line than she has.

We have both tried, in season and out of season, to so live that we would not bring your gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. I, for one, have tried to shun the demon rum for your sake. I have come home early nights, so that you could know where I was, and I have always been willing that you should smell of my breath if you felt so disposed. I have never filled a drunkard's grave or brought reproach upon you.

Spelling is not always my best hold, but I aim to please as a parent. I have tried not to bring the blush of shame to your fuzzy cheek, and wish you would try to do as much for me sometime.

When I was a boy, they didn't sugar coat education and make it one long drawn hallelujah to go to school as they now do. On the contrary, the straggling ideas of the rudiments which I now have, was soaked into me by main strength and awkwardness. To get the rudiments of an education we had to possess great physical strength and normal courage.

When I see the student to-day with a big picture book done up in a shawl strap, wearing one of those little cigarettes in his mouth, and riding on the hind end of a horse car towards the big red female seminary, I often think of the days when I did a day's work before breakfast, and then walked two miles in order to be ready to get licked when the old cast iron cuss that presided over our school felt like it.

He was a noble brute. He taught on school, I reckon, because he hadn't education enough to engage in other manual pursuits.

He is now dead. I do not go over to the cemetery every Spring to decorate his grave. Spring is a very busy season with me. If he had died in the Winter, about forty years earlier than he did, I would have gone out of my way to decorate his grave. It would have been a pleasure to me.

When he died, your mother asked me if I was going to the funeral.

"No," says I, speaking up in that droll way of mine--"No," says I, "I shan't go to the funeral, but, as the feller says, I approve of it." That's the way I am about everything. I speak my mind right out and nobody ever knew me to hesitate about saying what I thought of a man, even if he was dead.

With better educational advantages, I always thought our schoolmaster would have made a good pirate; but his parents was poor and so he had to hustle for himself. He had an earnest desire to advance in his profession, but he did not succeed in carving his name on the heights of fame. He yearned for glory and grub. I remember that he used to teach school Winters and work out Summers on a farm. In this way he kept up his muscle all the time; and though he frequently got mixed up in long division, he was never successfully licked, up to the time that old Mr. Bright came along with his justly celebrated disease and introduced it into the schoolmaster's daily life. Then he yielded gently. Like a flake of ice cream on the bosom of a fat man, the schoolmaster began to subside. One by one his kidneys began to fail. Paler and paler grew the great educator, till at last, one evening in Spring, just as the bull-frogs over in the north medder had unwrapped the red flannel from their throats and sounded "A," our old schoolmaster skun out for the sweet ultimately. Hundreds of his old pupils all over the State telegraphed their consent. It was the most harmonious thing I ever knew of. I regarded it as a great success.

So you can see, Henry, the kind of a tutor I had, and that is partly why I sometimes spell words erroneously if the ink has been froze.

I hope these few lines will find you in good health, and that in your subsequent letters you will devote more space to telling of the things you know, instead of telling me about the things I don't know. Your mother also joins me in hoping so.