The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1938-10-06

AAO" hAhNy AANW wy ntAAN
i V i of you to ask me to your
place in the country for the
coming weekend!
Your invitation reached me a little
more than two weeks ago, and l sup
pose 1 ought to have answered sooner.
In fact 1 know 1 ought to have. But
for reasons which l Shall explain
have kept putting 1t off.
Having failed to answer promptly,
suppose l ought now to telegraph. In
fact I know / ought to. A telegram
might ease matters quite bit. l could
say l had just got back from Europe
and found your letter. But there's
the rub My dear old father, Fabian
.P Otis, was always the soul of honor
in spite of that trouble about his bank,
and he taught me from infancy never
to lie If there was a chance of my be-
ing found out. If 1 wired that l had
been in Europe you might meet some
body who had seen me in the past
fortnight, or you might have been in
town yourself and caught sight of me
.Somewhere-for though l am harder
up than l ever thought a member of
the Otis family could be, have de-
viSed some little economies which en-
able me to get about as much as ever,
and l still go to the best places. Fa-
Their, l know, would wish it so, for
though he believed in thrift, he always
said there was nothing too good for an
Otis.
You will probably remember that
just after the bank trouble, when IA
ther was being prosecuted, the papers
used to say there was nothing too
bad for an Otis, but that was mere
hysteria, and the whole thing is mostly
forgotten already. Moreover l want
to say that in spite of fathers Jail SEN
tence IT. wasn't his fault about the
bank. People came in and drew out
money against fathers advice, and
after a while the money was gone, so
what could father do but shut the
doors?
However, I hadn't meant to go into
these matters. l was coming to the
reason why / hadn't telegraphed you.
That has something to do with father,
too. l wish you could know him, but
of course he isn't getting around these
days. He was such a fine man, Mrs.
Plam0ndin. He did everything for his
family, even when he had to borrow
money from his bank to do it. Thate
one of the things they blamed him for.
Imagine! And yet at the same time,
by a kind of paradox in his nature,
father always tried to teach us chill
dren thrift. l still have the copy
books he gave me when l was learn
ing to write They are full of quaint
old maXims of the pre-Brain Trust era
which had to copy in careful spen-
cerian hand-things like, From saving
comes having" and Economy is the
parent of integrity, of liberty and of
ease"
Of course we now realize that the
people who wrote such maXims didn't
know what they were talking about.
benjamin Franklin and AesOp are
merely funny, and l was much inter-
ested to near, the other day, that
there's going to be a new Brain Trust
copy-bool with maxims containing the
best modern thought on economics, and
that to symbolic the spirit Of the age
the writing will be backhand.
My sister is grown up now and of
course she doesn't wear pigtails. don't
think you've met her, and there's no
chance Of your meeting her for at
least another year, even if she gets the
full deduction for good behavior. In
her case it was not the bank. Her
trouble was that she had always been
told there was nothing too good for an
Otis, so she went ahead on that basis
and got into a kind of scrape.
Well, what was coming to is this:
that in spite of the fact that still 90
to the best places, those old copy-booE
maxims ride me a bit at times. When