Remarks | Page 7

in their own native tongue.
I never had any advantages when I was a boy, but your mother and I
decided that we would sock you full of knowledge, if your liver held
out, regardless of expense. We calculate to do it, only we want you to
go as slow on swallowtail coats as possible till we can sell our hay.
Now, regarding that boat-paddling suit, and that baseball suit, and that
bathing suit, and that roller-rinktum suit, and that lawn-tennis suit,
mind, I don't care about the expense, because you say a young man

can't really educate himself thoroughly without them, but I wish you'd
send home what you get through with this fall, and I'll wear them
through the winter under my other clothes. We have a good deal
severer winters here than we used to, or else I'm failing in bodily health.
Last winter I tried to go through without underclothes, the way I did
when I was a boy, but a Manitoba wave came down our way and
picked me out of a crowd with its eyes shet.
In your last letter you alluded to getting injured in a little "hazing
scuffle with a pelican from the rural districts." I don't want any harm to
come to you, my son, but if I went from the rural districts and another
young gosling from the rural districts undertook to haze me, I would
meet him when the sun goes down, and I would swat him across the
back of the neck with a fence board, and then I would meander across
the pit of his stomach and put a blue forget-me-not under his eye.
Your father aint much on Grecian mythology and how to get the square
root of a barrel of pork, but he wouldn't allow any educational
institutions to haze him with impunity. Perhaps you remember once
when you tried to haze your father a little, just to kill time, and how
long it took you to recover. Anybody that goes at it right can have a
good deal of fun with your father, but those who have sought to
monkey with him, just to break up the monotony of life, have most
always succeeded in finding what they sought.
[Illustration: RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE.]
I ain't much of a pensman, so you will have to excuse this letter. We are
all quite well, except old Fan, who has a galded shoulder, and hope this
will find you enjoying the same great blessing.
Your Father.

Archimedes.
Archimedes, whose given name has been accidentally torn off and
swallowed up in oblivion, was born in Syracuse, 2,171 years ago last

spring. He was a philosopher and mathematical expert. During his life
he was never successfully stumped in figures. It ill befits me now,
standing by his new-made grave, to say aught of him that is not of
praise. We can only mourn his untimely death, and wonder which of
our little band of great men will be the next to go.
Archimedes was the first to originate and use the word "Eureka." It has
been successfully used very much lately, and as a result we have the
Eureka baking powder, the Eureka suspender, the Eureka bed-bug
buster, the Eureka shirt, and the Eureka stomach bitters. Little did
Archimedes wot, when he invented this term, that it would come into
such general use.
Its origin has been explained before, but it would not be out of place
here for me to tell it as I call it to mind now, looking back over Archie's
eventful life.
King Hiero had ordered an eighteen karat crown, size 7-1/8, and, after
receiving it from the hands of the jeweler, suspected that it had been
adulterated. He therefore applied to Archimedes to ascertain, if possible,
whether such was the case or not. Archimedes had just got in on No. 3,
two hours late, and covered with dust. He at once started for a hot and
cold bath emporium on Sixteenth street, meantime wondering how the
dickens he would settle that crown business.
He filled the bath-tub level full, and, piling up his raiment on the floor,
jumped in. Displacing a large quantity of water, equal to his own bulk,
he thereupon solved the question of specific gravity, and, forgetting his
bill, forgetting his clothes, he sailed up Sixteenth street and all over
Syracuse, clothed in shimmering sunlight and a plain gold ring,
shouting "Eureka!" He ran head-first into a Syracuse policeman and
howled "Eureka!" The policeman said: "You'll have to excuse me; I
don't know him." He scattered the Syracuse Normal school on its way
home, and tried to board a Fifteenth street bob-tail car, yelling
"Eureka!" The car-driver told him that Eureka wasn't on the car, and
referred Archimedes to a clothing store.
Everywhere