Training is everything.
The peach was once a bitter almond;
cauliflower is nothing
but cabbage with a college
education. —Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s Calendar
Remark of Dr. Baldwin’s,
concerning upstarts: We don’t care
to eat toadstools that
think they are truffles. —
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s
Calendar
Mrs. York Driscoll enjoyed two years of bliss with
that prize, Tom—bliss that was troubled
a little at times, it is true, but bliss nevertheless;
then she died, and her husband and his childless sister,
Mrs. Pratt, continued this bliss-business at the old
stand. Tom was petted and indulged and spoiled
to his entire content—or nearly that.
This went on till he was nineteen, then he was sent
to Yale. He went handsomely equipped with “conditions,”
but otherwise he was not an object of distinction
there. He remained at Yale two years, and then
threw up the struggle. He came home with his
manners a good deal improved; he had lost his surliness
and brusqueness, and was rather pleasantly soft and
smooth, now; he was furtively, and sometimes openly,
ironical of speech, and given to gently touching people
on the raw, but he did it with a good-natured semiconscious
air that carried it off safely, and kept him from
getting into trouble. He was as indolent as ever
and showed no very strenuous desire to hunt up an
occupation. People argued from this that he preferred
to be supported by his uncle until his uncle’s
shoes should become vacant. He brought back one
or two new habits with him, one of which he rather
openly practiced—tippling—but
concealed another, which was gambling. It would
not do to gamble where his uncle could hear of it;
he knew that quite well.
Tom’s Eastern polish was not popular among the
young people. They could have endured it, perhaps,
if Tom had stopped there; but he wore gloves, and
that they couldn’t stand, and wouldn’t;
so he was mainly without society. He brought
home with him a suit of clothes of such exquisite
style and cut in fashion—Eastern fashion,
city fashion—that it filled everybody with
anguish and was regarded as a peculiarly wanton affront.
He enjoyed the feeling which he was exciting, and paraded
the town serene and happy all day; but the young fellows
set a tailor to work that night, and when Tom started
out on his parade next morning, he found the old deformed
Negro bell ringer straddling along in his wake tricked
out in a flamboyant curtain-calico exaggeration of
his finery, and imitating his fancy Eastern graces
as well as he could.
Tom surrendered, and after that clothed himself in
the local fashion. But the dull country town
was tiresome to him, since his acquaintanceship with
livelier regions, and it grew daily more and more so.
He began to make little trips to St. Louis for refreshment.
There he found companionship to suit him, and pleasures
to his taste, along with more freedom, in some particulars,
than he could have at home. So, during the next
two years, his visits to the city grew in frequency
and his tarryings there grew steadily longer in duration.
