Annie Laurie
The Logan Republican/January 10, 1906
A Little Story That Should Appeal to the Interest of Every Reader
I met a man I used to know this morning. When I used to know him, he was a good-natured, good-looking, rosy-cheeked little man, with a fine, prosperous little shop in a fine, prosperous little street.
This morning when I met him I did not know him until he spoke to me. His red cheeks had turned white, his good clothes had grown shabby, his square, courageous little shoulders were drooping.
“Well,” he said, “I think I’m going to land It.”
“Land what?” I said.
“Why, the estate,” said the little man, staring at me with beaming eyes. “The big English estate, you know, that belonged by right to my great grandfather, and ought to belong to me. I’ve had an awful time about it, but my lawyer says if I can just raise $5,000 more he can prove my case so that the chief justice of England himself will have to admit it.”
“How’s the shop doing?” said I.
“The shop?”
The little man’s haggard face was blank. “Oh, yes, you mean my old business. Oh, I sold that long ago; had to, to pay my lawyers.”
“And the pretty little home you were building?”
“That’s gone, too,” said the little man. “It wasn’t up to what I ought to have, anyway. When I come into my estates, I’ll build the right kind or a home for a man of property.”
All gone—business, home, happiness, peace of mind—all, all gone to the lawyers.
Don’t laugh too hard at the little man. I wonder If some of us are not stepping right in his very footsteps. The money we’re going to have when we’ve pinched ourselves to death for a few years longer, the old friends we’re going to visit when they are under the green and growing grass, the children we’re going to find time to love and play with when they’ve learned to live without us, the little garden that’s going to smile under our hands when we get through making our fortunes, the fair moonlight that is going to illuminate the waters under the bow of the little old canoe we’re going to paddle up quiet inlets, when we’ve finished crushing the rival competitor out of business.
Dreams, dreams. Why don’t we turn them into reality?
I’d give more for one little cheap posey sent to me by one friend who remembered than for all the wreaths heaped mountain high upon my coffin. We’re alive now; let’s live now.
Let’s laugh and love, right now. Don’t let’s wait until we come into the estate which some old great-great-grandfather ought to have handed down to us, but didn’t care enough about us to remember to do it.
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