you’re got to peg and peg and peg and there just ain’t any let-up—­and what you learn here, you’ve got to know, dontchuknow —­or else you’ll have one of these ------spavined, spectacles, ring-boned, knock-kneed old professors in your hair.  I’ve been here long enough, and I’m getting blessed tired of it, mind I tell you.  The old man wrote me that he was coming over in June, and said he’d take me home in August, whether I was done with my education or not, but durn him, he didn’t come; never said why; just sent me a hamper of Sunday-school books, and told me to be good, and hold on a while.  I don’t take to Sunday-school books, dontchuknow—­I don’t hanker after them when I can get pie—­but I read them, anyway, because whatever the old man tells me to do, that’s the thing that I’m a-going to do, or tear something, you know.  I buckled in and read all those books, because he wanted me to; but that kind of thing don’t excite me, I like something hearty.  But I’m awful homesick.  I’m homesick from ear-socket to crupper, and from crupper to hock-joint; but it ain’t any use, I’ve got to stay here, till the old man drops the rag and give the word—­yes, sir, right here in this ------country I’ve got to linger till the old man says come!—­and you bet your bottom dollar, Johnny, it ain’t just as easy as it is for a cat to have twins!”

At the end of this profane and cordial explosion he fetched a prodigious “Whoosh!” to relieve his lungs and make recognition of the heat, and then he straightway dived into his narrative again for “Johnny’s” benefit, beginning, “Well, ------it ain’t any use talking, some of those old American words do have a kind of a bully swing to them; a man can express himself with ’em—­a man can get at what he wants to say, dontchuknow.”

When we reached our hotel and it seemed that he was about to lose the Reverend, he showed so much sorrow, and begged so hard and so earnestly that the Reverend’s heart was not hard enough to hold out against the pleadings —­so he went away with the parent-honoring student, like a right Christian, and took supper with him in his lodgings, and sat in the surf-beat of his slang and profanity till near midnight, and then left him—­left him pretty well talked out, but grateful “clear down to his frogs,” as he expressed it.  The Reverend said it had transpired during the interview that “Cholley” Adams’s father was an extensive dealer in horses in western New York; this accounted for Cholley’s choice of a profession.  The Reverend brought away a pretty high opinion of Cholley as a manly young fellow, with stuff in him for a useful citizen; he considered him rather a rough gem, but a gem, nevertheless.

CHAPTER XXI [Insolent Shopkeepers and Gabbling Americans]