He don't want me to
go through life regretting the past, and being afraid of the cars for
fear some act of my younger days will become known and queer me. I guess
pa knows how it is hisself.
Well, if there is one thing I am proud of, it is that I have always been
good. When I grow up to be a man, prosperous in business, and belonging
to a church, and married, and have children growing up around me, I can
put on an innocent face and a bold front, and point to my past with
pride, if I should go to live among strangers, where nobody took the
papers, and the people were not on to me. Pa says as long as your
conscience is clear, and your pores open, life is one glad, sweet song.
Well, I don't know, but if pa's conscience is clear, he must have
strained it the way they do rain water, to get the wigglers out, or
else he has used an egg to settle his conscience, the way they settle
coffee. If his pores are open, he has opened them in the old way, with
a corkscrew. But, with all I have had to contend with in the way of a
frightful example from pa, I am not so worse.
How many boys of my age, do you suppose, could put in a season with a
circus and have all the facilities I have had to go wrong, and come out
as well as I have? The way the freaks just doted on me would have turned
the heads of most boys, but when I found out that all of them, from the
fat woman and the bearded woman, to the trapeze performers, ate onions
three times a day, I said: "Nay, nay, Hennery will camp with the
animals, whose smell is natural, and not acquired.
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