She started easily:
"That's it; they always intimate that running a ranch is mere cream
puffs compared to a regular business, and they'd like to do the same
thing to-morrow if only they was ready to retire from active life. Mebbe
they get the idea from these here back-to-nature stories about a
brokendown bookkeeper, sixty-seven years old, with neuritis and gastric
complications and bum eyesight, and a wife that ain't ever seen a well
day; so they take every cent of their life savings of eighty-three
dollars and settle on an abandoned farm in Connecticut and clear nine
thousand dollars the first year raising the Little Giant caper for
boiled mutton. There certainly ought to be a law against such romantic
trifling. In the first place, think of a Connecticut farmer abandoning
anything worth money! Old Timmins comes from Connecticut. Any time that
old leech abandons a thing, bookkeepers and all other parties will do
well to ride right along with him. I tell you now--"
The second cigarette was under way, and suddenly, without modulation,
the performer was again on the theme, Posnett _nee_ Postlethwaite.
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