"
He picks out a label.
"If you can read so fast, what's that?" he asts.
She is a pink one. I thinks to myself; she either
is corn salve or else she ain't corn salve. And it
ain't natcheral he will pick corn salve, fur he would
think I would say that first off. So I'm betting it
ain't. I takes a chancet on it.
"That," says I, "is mighty easy reading. That is
Siwash Injun Sagraw." I lost.
"It's corn salve," he says. "And Great Scott!
They call this the twentieth century!"
"I never called it that," says I, sort o' mad-like.
Fur I was feeling bad Doctor Kirby had found out
I was such a ignoramus.
"Where ignorance is bliss," says he, "it is folly
to be wise. But all the same, I'm going to take
your education in hand and make you drink of
life's Peruvian springs." Or some spring like that it
was.
And the doctor, he done it. Looey said it
wouldn't be no use learning to read. He'd done a
lot of reading, he said, and it never helped him none.
All he ever read showed him this feller Hamlet was
right, he said, when he wrote Shakespeare's works,
and they wasn't much use in anything, without you
had a lot o' money. And they wasn't no chancet
to get that with all these here trusts around gobbling
up everything and stomping the poor man into the
dirt, and they was lots of times he wisht he was a
Injun sure enough, and not jest a medical one, fur
then he'd be a free man and the bosses and the
trusts and the railroads and the robber tariff
couldn't touch him.
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