The Monmouth inquirer. [volume] (Freehold, N.J.) 1865-1933, 1924-03-27
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Grasping at Straws

ing LOT 2 moment before uLleI1ng the
! "Coo-ee' with which he was in the
| habit of apprising Mrs. Ferguson Of
his arrival home. This time there
was no answering "Coo-ee." The house
was as silent as the .ohb. No Mar
| jorie came down the long stairs to
greet him; no Mrs. Ferguson stood at
the head of the stairs to give him a
smile. Putting his coat and hat on
! the rack, he tiptoed noiselessly up
| the stairs. At the door of Mrs. Fer
| guson's room he encountered strong
| smell of camphor, and he found Mrs.
Ferguson stretched across the bed,
either just coming out of or going
| into a fainting spell. He clasped her
in his arms, begging her to tell him
what had happened. She tried several
| times to speak, then ceased her in
| coherent mutterings, chung about his
neck and gave way to paroxysms Of
weeping upon his shoulder.
| He looked about for the cauae of
the trouble, called Marjorie, and no
| Marjorie replied. Finally he espied
a piece of crumpled note paper lying
upon the floor. He bent over side
ways and obtained it.
! Strengthening it with difficulty in
one hand, he held it out at arms
length and read:
Dearest Mamma: When you
read this Harold and l will have
been married. We are going to
Niagara Falls for a wedding tour
| and to give papa time to get over
his senseless opposition to Har-
old. Papa is the best papa in the
4 world, has always been, except for
s his opposition to Harold and in
+ his standing in the way of my
happiness. love him and shall
| always love him, and hope he
will forgive me.
/ Your loving daughter,
Is MARJORIE"
Ferguson dropped the note, buried
his face in Mrs. Ferguson's shoulder
and his whole body shook with
emotion. Mrs. Ferguson forgot the
depth of her own grief. She raised
her head and with swimming eyes
looked into his face. He was laugh
ing.
f'rWhat in the world!" she gasped.
tits such good joke" gasped Fer
guson.
"But you hated Harold"
''You thought So"
'But your every action showed it.
Even when he first began to call upon
Marjorie, before he had been calling a
month you began to treat him like a
dog. You frowned at him, you covert
| 1y but plainly sneered at every
opinion he advanced about anything.
Why, that night when you took the
alarm clock and went right irto the
room where they were at ten O'Clock
and wound it up right under his nose
] thought I should die. 1 did not
blame him for springing to his feet
and slambanging out of the house"
Neither did L"
"And you told Marjorie that it
would be utterly futile for her to be-
gin to care for Harold, because moth
ing could ever become of it. You
nearly broke the poor child's heart"
"That was very sad, but the heart
of youth is very plastic and very
flexible"
| but you hated him SO, and now
you are laughing. I don't under
stand"
"You see, dear, Harold is quite the
incest young man who had ever
called"
"You surprise me; you never"
"And it was very evident to me
when he had been calling a few times
that Marjorie did not care for him
and never would care for him, and
that he had 10 more than friendly
interest in her, which made me think
of my boyhood days upon the farm.
All kinds of cattle, you know, abomi-
nate straw as breakfast food, and II
it is thrown into their manager they
| turn from it in bovine disgust. Still,
straw is good for them, as good for
them as Marjorie was good for Harold.
On my fathers farm they. used to eat
up every ounce of straw raised on the
place and almost fight to get at it.
We used to build the straw into a
huge stack and build low fence
about the stack just high enough to
prevent a cows reaching it without
some effort and just far enough from
the stack so that she could barely
geach the straw"
''But / don't see."
'Listen a minute. At first the cows
ambled up caresessly to investigate
che straw stack and we set the dogs
upon them and drove them away. We
ran them about half mile. and if
we even caught them looking at that
straw stack we logged them into the
woods. These poor deluded cows
used to sit up nights until tley had
seen the light extinguished in my
window. Then they would crowd
against that fence until they wrecked
it. And then they filed up on straw.
"And so Harold and Marjorie are
married; Harold is fine boy, with