Grandview, Mo. April 8, 1912
Dear Bess:
Here goes for another start on your letter. Maybe I'll get it finished this time. My dear brother had to go and get his shoulder dislocated when I started the other one, and I was shaken up so on hearing it I couldn't write. That sounds rather feminine, doesn't it? Mamma says I was intended for a girl anyway. It makes me pretty mad to be told so but I guess it's partly so. When it comes to pulling teeth I always yell and I have an inordinate desire to look nice in a photo. You see I have some ladylike traits anyway. If ever you accuse me of having any, though, you may be sure I'll prevaricate and say I haven't. I told your mother I was going to get her a lily for Easter but couldn't carry it. Of course I couldn't possibly have paid a messenger to deliver it, could I? It was my intention to get it when we came home from the Rev. Cyrus Townsend Brady's, but as we didn't go of course no lily appeared. I hope she'll give me credit for good intentions. There goes another piece of Hellenic pavement to my credit. (I'm not referring to Greece, either.)
Will you please persuade George to persuade the alumni committee of the senior class to forget that they ever had any intention of giving me nervous prostration? If I get to come to their meeting and they should ask me to speak, I'd die of elevatoritis because I'd go right through the floor. It was my hope that I'd get to come and enjoy myself but I sure wouldn't if that calamity were hanging over me. I wouldn't mind making a botch on my own account but I'd so hate to humiliate my friends. Besides, the meeting is on Friday night and unless something happens to annul a Masonic meeting I'll have to stay home. If I get to go, will you honor muh with yuh company? If I don't show up by 8:00 p.m. you'll know I couldn't kill the Masonic goat and that I'm not coming. If you want to go with any of the other good-looking fellows, you'd better, then you'll have a sure escort. Then if I come, I can suffer from the little green god as well as from luck ague. There are more I's, me's, my's in this than I have succeeded in putting into a letter for a long time. You know I am of a rather retiring disposition and it hurts me to blow my own trumpet so much. I wouldn't only you know that I'm horribly anxious for you to suffer from an excessively good opinion of me! If you should happen to do that and at some date in the distant future I should get to acting up, can't you hand me one by just telling me what I've said on paper? (Provided you don't consign these to range, as Agnes's flame said.) I really don't care a hoot what you do with my letters so long as you write me-that's what I'm laboring for, a letter from you. You may read them to anyone you choose, put 'em under the parlor carpet, or start fires with 'em-just as long as you send me an answer, which by the way won't be used for any of the above- mentioned purposes.
Well, let's change the subject what do you say? Not that I'd ever get tired of it. I shelled corn by hand all day today. That is as long as I could hold my eyes open. I was sitting on the floor in the sitting room shelling seed corn as hard as I could, when pretty soon Papa came in and yelled, "Harry, dinner's ready! Why don't you come on, you going to sleep all day?" I'd been asleep for an hour and didn't know it. You see, I got up at 4:30 a.m. and turned in at 1:30 a.m., which is a rather long stretch between naps. A freight train got in front of the passenger last night and I got off in our pasture and only had to walk about half as far as usual. The moon was just getting up as the train came round the bend and it looked exactly as if our barn was on fire. I was scared stiff. When I got to the jumping off place I decided it was a neighbor's house and only came to the moon conclusion when I got to the house. Some poor fellow was stalled in an auto about two hundred yards from the gate but got started about the time I got to the house. Wouldn't it be pleasant to be laid out about twenty miles from home about 1:00 a.m.? You ought to know for you tried it once. I hope you'll take the risk again sometime soon. Send me a letter immejate [sic].
Most sincerely, Harry