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

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I climbed over the fence, anyway, and was soon racing toward a mammoth elm tree—a tree that had budded and leaves more than sixty times since the day I last saw that place. The hunters came over on the bound. “It went up this tree,” I lied. There was no squirrel. I was in truth a boy again—a very small boy—resorting to childish subterfuges.

E D WOODBURN

Lawyer

HOLTON, KANSAS

October 19, 1931

Mr. John Bristow, Wetmore, Kansas

Dear John:--

I want to express to you my appreciation for the opportunity of reading your article, “The Boy of Yesteryear” published in the Wetmore Spectator May 29, 1931.

I have never understood and have always regretted the fact that you quit the newspaper field. It has always seemed to me that with your ability to write, you could have been useful as a newspaper man. You have the happy faculty of getting and holding one’s attention from beginning to end.

Yours very truly,

E D WOODBURN

But my “idiotic” idea wasn’t so bad. The hunters a got a nice bag of squirrels on that side of the fence and in passing the spot again an hour later one of party thought she saw my mythical squirrel go into a hole in one of the top-most branches of that old monarch of the woods. So that was that. Kindly forget the ethics involved. We hunted the timber the full length of that place Dad’s old farm. Now there were big trees—and some tall trees. As I remember, there were big tall trees on that place when we lived there more than a half century ago. My father split rails from that timber to fence the farm, And as ex-woodsman he was he was inordinately proud of that rail fence, of his excellent craftsmanship. In his native state, with the straight-splitting birch and poplars, it would have been a simple matter. Here it was an accomplishment.