" In our
country nearly every family knows that domestic tragedy when the
son and heir "breaks home ties," and starts out to earn a living; and
if all the world loves a lover, it at least sympathizes with the boy
who is "looking for a job." The boy who is looking for the job may
not think so, but each of those who has passed through the same
hard place gives him, if nothing else, his good wishes. McGiffin's
letters at this period gain for him from those who have had the
privilege to read them the warmest good feeling.
They are filled with the same cheery optimism, the same slurring
over of his troubles, the same homely jokes, the same assurances
that he is feeling "bully," and that it all will come out right, that
every boy, when he starts out in the world, sends back to his
mother.
"I am in first-rate health and spirits, so I don't want you to fuss
about me. I am big enough and ugly enough to scratch along
somehow, and I will not starve."
To his mother he proudly sends his name written in Chinese
characters, as he had been taught to write it by the Chinese
Consul-General in San Francisco, and a pen-picture of two
elephants. "I am going to bring you home _two_ of these," he
writes, not knowing that in the strange and wonderful country to
which he is going elephants are as infrequent as they are in
Pittsburg.
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