The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Jolly by Josh, by "Josh"

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Title: A Jolly by Josh

Author: "Josh"

Release Date: January 13, 2006 [eBook #17499]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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A JOLLY BY JOSH

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MCMII

Dear Charlie,--Having a spare moment as I crossed the continent
last time, I sat down in the rear end of a Lake Shore Limited
train, and began to cast about me with a view to hitting upon some
way of passing the time amicably with myself. As I looked about
the car, I studied the faces and persons of my fellow-travellers,
and found them uniformly uninteresting. My mind wandered from them
out of the window, and I noted with a casual eye the advance
civilization was making on both sides of the track. I began
wandering vaguely from that back to the time when this was a
trackless wilderness; and I pictured to myself the advent of the
white man, and so on in an aimless sort of a way, from the
beginning of our country until I reached the Declaration of
Independence, the terms of which have always remained vividly
impressed upon my mind.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!" That is what we are
after. So it is. How ridiculous! Why don't we think of it oftener?
How many of us are free? How many of us are happy? And,
particularly, how many of us would be any happier if we got the
things we want? What foolish wants we have, anyway! Almost
everybody wants something they don't want.

Just then my eye caught sight of the official stenographer
advertised as free. To an economical soul like mine the
opportunity of having a free stenographer for a day and a half was
too good to let slip by. So, placing my chair up alongside of his,
I took from my pocket a letter which I had just received from my
nephew, who had been spending his vacation in the West, and which
I had not known