Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

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That tanyard was, I might say, a howling success while it lasted. Besides the tanyard, my father owned a bunch of boys, and those boys, semi-obedient and helpful, really did some commendable things, but when encouraged and abetted by the other town boys of that happy, care-free age, their doings were not always something to be commended.

Taken by the large—including, of course, the English and the Irish and the “Dutch,” and a couple of Swedes — they were, I must admit, a dare-devil bunch. And I might as well confess now that I was, perhaps, the most devilish one of them all. Anyhow, I became a printer’s “devil” at an early age.

My father made good leather—and he knew how to get the most out of it. Being a shoemaker, he made it up into good boots and shoes and gave his boys a good leather dressing whenever they needed it—that is, when their deviltry came within his notice. The Lord knows there were hundreds of times when they escaped only by narrow margins. And had my father been a little more vigilant, this day of which I write promised to be the red-letter day.