Читать книгу Life of an American Workman онлайн

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Settle down? Why, that was just the trouble! I'd never had a chance to put myself in a situation from which I could settle down, or so I felt. You couldn't hell around in Ellis. If the gang even had a keg of beer out at the ball field, every mother knew it and spoke her mind.

Besides, I just knew that any other town was better than Ellis; any time I met a stranger, no matter where he came from, he knew things that were unknown in Ellis. To my parents, my defense was that I had ambition and wanted to get ahead.

I was too big to lick with the hairbrush, so my mother tried to win me to her way of thinking by crying; at intervals she pleaded with me to have some sense and listen to my father. She would remind me that not all cooking was like that I got at home, and then she would shed more tears. I could not argue; what I did was to snatch my hat, rush out and slam the door. I did not want to hear their arguments, because what they had to say, I knew, was far from foolish. After all, they did like me at the shop.