FullReads

“My dear fellow,” protested Muggles, “it was much more comfortable in the omnibus, and–“

“–And broke up her walk home with Bobby, you idiot! He had to take the owl train home, and she won’t see him for a month. Didn’t you know they were engaged?”

“No–“

“Of course you didn’t, Muggles, but you could have seen it in her face if you’d looked. You always put your foot in it clean up to your pants’ pocket!”

“You’ve been at it again, have you, Muggles?” burst out Bender that same night “Listen to the Goat’s last, boys. Jerry wanted to buy that swamp meadow next his place on Long Island and had been dickering with the old fellow who owns it all winter, telling him it would be a good place to raise cranberries if it was dug out and drained, and they had almost agreed on the price–about twice what it was worth–when down goes Muggles to spend the night and Jerry blabs it all out, and just why he wanted it, and the next morning Muggles, to clinch the deal and help Jerry, slips over to the hayseed and tells him how the Sunnybrook Club are going to buy Jerry’s place, and how they wanted the swamp for a hatchery–all true–and that the hayseed oughtn’t to wait a moment, but send word by HIM that the deal was closed, because the club-house being near by would make all the rest of his land twice as valuable; and the old Skeezicks winked his eye and shifted his tobacco and said he’d think about it, and now you can’t buy that sink-hole for twenty times what it’s worth, and the Sunnybrook is looking for another site nearer Woodvale. Regular clown you are, Muggles. Exactly like that fellow at the circus who holds up one end of the tent and then, before the supes can reach it, drops it for the other end.”

When the results of this last well-intentioned effort with its disastrous consequences became clear to the Goat, that spotless gentleman leaned back in his chair, threw hick his shoulders, shot out his cuffs, readjusted his scarfpin and replied in an offended tone:

“All owing, my dear fellow, to the stupidity of the agricultural class. I told the farmer he would regret it, and he will. As for myself, I was awfully disappointed. I had planned to run all the way back to Jerry’s and tell him the good news before he went to sleep that night, and–“

“Disappointed, were you? How do you think Jerry felt? Made a lot of difference to him, I tell you, not selling his place to the club. Been a whole year working it up. It’s smothered now under a blanket–about ninety per cent of its value–and the Sunnybrook scheme would have pulled him out with a margin! Now it’s deader than last year’s shad. What the club wanted was a hatchery built over a spring, and that’s why that swamp was necessary to the deal. Oh, you’re the limit, Muggles!”

It was while smarting under these criticisms that the steward one morning in June brought him his letters. One was from Monteith–Class of ‘9l–a senior when Muggles was a freshman–and was postmarked “Wabacog, Canada,” where Monteith owned a lumber mill–and where he ran it himself and everything connected with it from stumpage to scantling. “There is a broad stream that runs into the lake, … and above the mill there are bass weighing ten pounds, … and back in the primeval forest bears, … and now and then a moose–” So ran the letter. Muggles had spread it wide open by this time and was reading it aloud–everybody knowing Monteith–and the group never having any secrets of this kind from each other.

“Come up, old chap,” the letter continued, “and stay a week–two, if you can work it–and bring Bender, and little Billy and Poddy, and three or four more. The bungalow holds ten. Wire when–I’m now putting things on ice.”