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'They reach grandada's hands by afternoon post, Harry, and he finds objectionable passages blotted or cut out; and as long as the scissors don't touch the business columns and the debates, he never asks me what I have been doing. He thinks I keep a scrap-book. I haven't often time in the morning to run an eye all over the paper. This morning it was the first thing I saw. What had she seen?
Other times it was hid with a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me. This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head.
And he'd been out all night. That's worth considering from his standpoint, Mr. Brereton." Brereton nodded his assent and turned away with another warning glance. And presently Pett and the superintendent went off, and Bent dropped into his easy chair with a laugh. "Queer sort of unexpected legacy!" he said. "I wonder if the old man really thought I should be interested in his scrap-book?"
Her father used to read the verses to her to tease her when she was in her teens, and once when she was in her twenties, and Jeanette had the lonely poet out to dinner one Sunday, she sat with him on the sofa in the library, looking at the old scrap-book. Their eyes fell upon the verses about the angels bringing Jeanette, and the girl noticed the old man mumming it over and smiling.
He had a scrap-book for his arithmetic "sums," too, and one of these is still in existence with this boyish rhyme in a boyish scrawl, underneath one of his tables of weights and measures: Abraham Lincoln his hand and pen he will be good but god knows when.
Once upon a time I found a ten-cent magazine lying on a bench in a little city park. Anyhow, that was the amount he asked me for when I sat on the bench next to him. He was a musty, dingy, and tattered magazine, with some queer stories bound in him, I was sure. He turned out to be a scrap-book. "I am a newspaper reporter," I said to him, to try him.
"Why, Mr. Barton," she said, "we couldn't get home now in all this storm and darkness and wash-out to save our lives. But even if it were moonlight," she singsonged, "and starlight and high-noon; even if there were chariots at the door, I'm not going home now till I've finished my scrap-book if it takes a week." "Eh?" jerked Barton. "What?" Laboriously he edged himself forward.
Here is one story, as told by the scrap-book, of an expedition that failed. That it failed was due to a British Cabinet Minister; for had Lord Derby possessed the imagination of the Soldier of Fortune, his Majesty's dominions might now be the richer by many thousands of square miles and many thousands of black subjects.
He tries to tell ten stories at once; he pours into the pot all the chaotic fancies and crude experiences of his boyhood; he sticks in irrelevant short stories shamelessly, as into a scrap-book; he adopts designs and abandons them, begins episodes and leaves them unfinished; but from the first page to the last there is a nameless and elemental ecstasy that of the man who is doing the kind of thing that he can do.
If some one should take the picture, I could never get another that would mean so much to me." They began to walk up and down the room. The little boy was clinging to Mother's hand and he kept tangling his pink feet in the folds of his night dress, while his tearful eyes were fixed steadfastly upon the earnest face above him. "Mother!" he suddenly called out, "where's my scrap-book?"
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