Grandview Feb. 24, 1914
Dear Bess:
Well, here goes a letter from home once more. My dear sister is about to have a fit. She saw whom I am writing to. Your note about Aunt Ada was very much appreciated, and I feel the same way about wishing it had been some of the rest of them. She was the nicest sister Mamma had, and I thought more of her than any of them. I think she liked me pretty well too.
I have got to take the nigger to town this evening but I won't get to stay because Papa is on the jury. Wouldn't it be good if we had him on our own jury? I guess we'll have all the performance to go through with again in thirty days. That is, if we can manage to satisfy the lawyer's rapacious appetites for money. I see where I made a grave mistake in studying music when I could have studied law and bought canned music. I could have grabbed a piece of the Young estate without having to wait my turn at all then. Now it looks very much as if there won't be any turn. Every trial costs about $3,000, whether it goes or not. Wouldn't it be grand to run a department store on the court plan? Sell a piece of goods and make a mistake, and then sell the person another piece off the same bolt to correct it and have that wrong, and so on ad lib. That's court procedure all right. If you win, you lose. It's like the board of trade. The only sure winner is the middle man, the lawyer. Goodrich said he made $2,500 week before last giving advice! I wish my conversation was worth that much.
If I get in town in time this afternoon, I am going to get the tickets to that Slipper show. I'd be willing to bet that that lawyer, whose name begins with box but whose head I can't hardly call that, will want me to run some errand for him on the night I pick. He can unreservedly go hang or somewhere else.
Uncle Harry says he's going back to town this morning. I've an idea he's hankerin' for about three fingers on a small glass and some chips to rattle. It'll be my job to drag him out of town next time he's wanted. It seems to me that it's a most awful mistake to begin taking any responsibility on yourself. He always has let someone else do his worrying and there's always been someone to do it.
I hope you'll not be too much put out by this dry, personal opinion letter but I've been chasing from point to point for the last month not knowing half the time whether I was going or coming as far as accomplishing anything I could see was concerned, and I've almost got a case of nerves. That sentence is good enough to go in a German grammar. Mark says that German literary lights travel all day in one sentence and that makes them celebrities. He evidently knew, for he gave a sentence covering four printed pages to illustrate his point.
I have been reading the Redbook. I hope never to begin another continued story. They always leave off right at the edge of things and make you wonder if you can possibly wait a month without bursting, and when the next number comes you run across a continued story and wonder what the first of it was about.
I hope you and Helen enjoy the Orpheum and I wish very much that I could come to Independence to the show but, as usual, there's an obstacle. If Papa should happen to get off then, I'll come and this letter will be for sale at a discount. You can write me one though in return for a box of candy I'll bring with me and in answer to this if I don't come.
Sincerely, Harry