ed sight more uncertain than
horse-racing--it's harder to pick a winner at it. You go home worrying
because you're afraid that your fool new clerk forgot to lock the safe
after you, and during the night the lard refinery burns down; you spend
a year fretting because you think Bill Jones is going to cut you out
with your best girl, and then you spend ten worrying because he didn't;
you worry over Charlie at college because he's a little wild, and he
writes you that he's been elected president of the Y.M.C.A.; and you
worry over William because he's so pious that you're afraid he's going
to throw up everything and go to China as a missionary, and he draws on
you for a hundred; you worry because you're afraid your business is
going to smash, and your health busts up instead. Worrying is the one
game in which, if you guess right, you don't get any satisfaction out of
your smartness. A busy man has no time to bother with it. He can always
find plenty of old women in skirts or trousers to spend their days
worrying over their own troubles and to sit up nights waking his.

Speaking of handing over your worries to others naturally calls to mind
the Widow Williams and her son Bud, who was a playmate of mine when I
was a boy. Bud was the youngest of the Widow's troubles, and she was a
woman whose troubles seldom came singly. Had fourteen altogether, and
four pair of 'em were twins. Used to turn 'em loose in the morning, when
she let out her cows and pigs to browse along the street, and then she'd
shed all worry over them for the rest of the day. Allowed that if they
got hurt the neighbors would bring them home; and that if they got
hungry they'd come home. And someways, the whole drove always showed up
safe and dirty about meal time.

I've no doubt she thought a lot of Bud, but when a woman has fourteen it
sort of unsettles her mind so that she can't focus her affections or
play any favorites. And so when Bud's clothes were found at the swimming
hole one day, and no Bud inside them, she didn't take on up to the
expectations of the neighbors who had brought the news, and who were
standing around waiting for her to go off into something special in the
way of high-strikes.

She allowed that they were Bud's clothes, all right, but she wanted to
know where the remains were. Hinted that there'd be no funeral, or such
like expensive goings-on, until some one produced the deceased. Take her
by and large, she was a pretty cool, calm cucu