The Golden Honeymoon | Page 5

was pretty close
to noon, so we decided to all have dinner together and they was nothing

for it only we must try their cafeteria on Third Avenue. It was a little
more expensive than ours and not near as good, I thought. I and Mother
had about the same dinner we had been having every day and our bill
was $1.10. Frank's check was $1.20 for he and his wife. The same meal
wouldn't of cost them more than a dollar at our place.
After dinner we made them come up to our house and we all set in the
parlor, which the young woman had give us the use of to entertain
company. We begun talking over old times and Mother said she was
a-scared Mrs. Hartsell would find it tiresome listening to we three talk
over old times, but as it turned out they wasn't much chance for nobody
else to talk with Mrs. Hartsell in the company. I have heard lots of
women that could go it, but Hartsell's wife takes the cake of all the
women I ever seen. She told us the family history of everybody in the
State of Michigan and bragged for a half hour about her son, who she
said is in the drug business in Grand Rapids, and a Rotarian.
When I and Hartsell could get a word in edgeways we joked one
another back and forth and I chafed him about being a horse doctor.
"Well, Frank," I said, " you look pretty prosperous, so I suppose they's
been plenty of glanders around Hillsdale."
"Well," he said, "I've managed to make more than a fair living. But I've
worked pretty hard."
"Yes," I said, "and I suppose you get called out all hours of the night to
attend births and so on."
Mother made me shut up.
Well, I thought they wouldn't never go home and I and Mother was in
misery trying to keep awake, as the both of us generally always takes a
nap after dinner. Finally they went, after we had made an engagement
to meet them in the Park the next morning, and Mrs. Hartsell also
invited us to come to their place the next night and play five hundred.
But she had forgot that they was a meeting of the Michigan Society that
evening, so it was not till two evenings later that we had our first card

game.
Hartsell and his wife lived in a house on Third Avenue North and had a
private setting room besides their bedroom. Mrs. Hartsell couldn't quit
talking about their private setting room like it was something wonderful.
We played cards with them, with Mother and Hartsell partners against
his wife and I. Mrs. Hartsell is a miserable card player and we certainly
got the worst of it.
After the game she brought out a dish of oranges and we had to pretend
it was just what we wanted, though oranges down there is like a young
man's whiskers; you enjoy them at first, but they get to be a pesky
nuisance.
We played cards again the next night at our place with the same
partners and I and Mrs. Hartsell was beat again. Mother and Hartsell
was full of compliments for each other on what a good team they made,
but the both of them knowed well enough where the secret of their
success laid. I guess all and all we must of played ten different
evenings and they was only one night when Mrs. Hartsell and I come
out ahead. And that one night wasn't no fault of hern.
When we had been down there about two weeks, we spent one evening
as their guest in the Congregational Church, at a social give by the
Michigan Society. A talk was made by a man named Bitting of Detroit,
Michigan, on How I was Cured of Story Telling. He is a big man in the
Rotarians and give a witty talk.
A woman named Mrs. Oxford rendered some selections which Mrs.
Hartsell said was grand opera music, but whatever they was my
daughter Edie could of give her cards and spades and not made such a
hullaballoo about it neither.
Then they was a ventriloquist from Grand Rapids and a young woman
about forty-five years of age that mimicked different kinds of birds. I
whispered to Mother that they all sounded like a chicken, but she
nudged me to shut up.

After the show we stopped in a drug store and I set up the refreshments
and it was pretty close to ten o'clock before we finally turned in.
Mother and I would of preferred tending the movies, but Mother said
we mustn't offend Mrs. Hartsell, though I asked her had we came to
Florida to enjoy ourselves or