A Jolly by Josh

A Jolly by Josh

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Title: A Jolly by Josh
Author: "Josh"

Release Date: January 13, 2006 [eBook #17499]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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A JOLLY BY JOSH

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MCMII

Dear Charlie,--Having a spare moment as I crossed the continent last
time, I sat down in the rear end of a Lake Shore Limited train, and
began to cast about me with a view to hitting upon some way of
passing the time amicably with myself. As I looked about the car, I
studied the faces and persons of my fellow-travellers, and found them
uniformly uninteresting. My mind wandered from them out of the
window, and I noted with a casual eye the advance civilization was
making on both sides of the track. I began wandering vaguely from that
back to the time when this was a trackless wilderness; and I pictured to
myself the advent of the white man, and so on in an aimless sort of a
way, from the beginning of our country until I reached the Declaration
of Independence, the terms of which have always remained vividly
impressed upon my mind.
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!" That is what we are after.
So it is. How ridiculous! Why don't we think of it oftener? How many
of us are free? How many of us are happy? And, particularly, how
many of us would be any happier if we got the things we want? What
foolish wants we have, anyway! Almost everybody wants something
they don't want.
Just then my eye caught sight of the official stenographer advertised as
free. To an economical soul like mine the opportunity of having a free
stenographer for a day and a half was too good to let slip by. So,
placing my chair up alongside of his, I took from my pocket a letter
which I had just received from my nephew, who had been spending his
vacation in the West, and which I had not known exactly how to
answer.
The train of thoughts in which I had indulged, and the peculiarly vacant
condition of my mind, made the time favorable for expansion upon the

theme which had occurred to me; and so I inflicted on the poor boy a
long letter, or sermon, or essay, or whatever you may please to call it,
which I am enclosing to you.
I know that you are interested in topics of this sort, and so send it along
with an apology for the amount of your valuable time which I am so
wilfully wasting.
Your old friend, JOSH.

Dear Tom,--I have just received your letter, asking if you could bring a
pony back from Colorado. I answer most assuredly, "Yes"; that is, if
you want to! But do you want to? This question having occurred to my
mind, and perhaps not to yours, you must excuse my becoming a little
long-winded if I launch out on a train of ideas which has presented
itself to my mind.
Let me briefly serve up the circumstances that surround you, and
perhaps I can paint them so that you will look at them from a new point
of view.
You are eighteen years of age. You have lived surrounded by wealth
and a good deal of luxury; but the luxury in which you were lapped was
the comfort with which a man of great working brain, who has well
earned the right to spend freely, chose to take for his own rest and
amusement, knowing well the value of every cent he has spent or given
away.
As the youngest of many sons, you have never had any responsibility;
and yet your parents have left you with a taste for all kinds of
expensive things, although, when you come to your money in a few
years, you will have enough to gratify only a small part of the tastes
which you have acquired. Nevertheless, the money to which you are
heir, while necessitating a lower rate of expenditures than that of the
household you have been brought up in, is sufficient to enable you to
live under much easier circumstances than most of your neighbors.

In fact, if many of your friends started life with the income that will be
yours, they would consider themselves decidedly rich, and