t and we went in and did
so.

Believe you me, it certainly is a remarkable thing the way you start on
a afternoon's work like I done, all full of vigor and strength and how
your ideas and courage and everything will sort of leak away toward the
time to put on the feed-bag at Evensong. And how again the ideas and pep
comes back in the evening once you have eaten. There was almost perfect
silence the first few minutes we sat down or would of been except for Ma
taking her tea out of the saucer, which I can't learn her not to do and
the only way I keep her from disgracing me at the Ritz and etc., is to
make sure she don't order it. But when the first pangs was attended to I
commenced to feel more conversational.

"Work," I says, thinking of what I had been thinking of. "Work is the
one thing that stands by a person. Everything else in life can go bluey
and their work will see them through. That's why it's been so popular
all these years, and where these Bolsheviks make their big mistake.
Because they don't work and not working they get bored to death and so
they commence rioting. Do you remember that quotation from that
well-known cowboy poet, Omaha Kiyim, "Satan will find business still for
idle hands to do?" How good that applies to strikes--idle hands--ain't
that perfect? And it written so long ago!"

"How long?" says Ma.

"Oh, I dunno. Maybe three hundred years," I says.

Ma laid down her knife and spoon, she being quite entirely through, and
looked me in the eye.

"I will remember them words, daughter," she says very solemn.

And it's the truth I never noticed how serious she was about it until I
come to look back on it nearly three weeks later.

IV

And during that time which has been so immortally fixed in writing by
the grandest book with the same name, I was as busy as the great
American cootie is supposed to be on his native hearth--only it ain't
that piece of furniture but another, of course. Do you get me? I'm
afraid so! Well, I was as busy as what you think. To begin with I called
a committee-meeting in the privacy of my grey French enamel boudoir
where I wear my boudoir cap and have the day-bed hitched and this
committee meeting consisted entirely of myself and the two fool dogs.
And after I had gone through all the motions, I appointed myself a
sub-committee of one to carry out the meeting's resolutions and do all
the work.

This is about what would of happened if I had done it the regular wa