"
Again, Westley Keyts could read how to cut up meats. He knew already,
but this chapter, illustrated with neat carcasses marked off into
numbered squares, convinced him that the book was not so light as some
of its other chapters indicated, and determined him to its purchase.
And there were letters for every conceivable emergency. "To a Young Man
who has quarrelled with his Master," "Dismissing a Teacher," "Inquiry
for Lost Baggage," "With a Basket of Fruit to an Invalid," and "To a
Gentleman elected to Congress." Rare indeed, in our earth life, would be
the crisis unmet by this treasury of knowledge. Not only was there an
elevation of tone in our correspondence that winter, resulting from the
persuasive activities of Mrs. Potts, but our writing became decorative
with flourishes in "the muscular" and "whole-arm" movements. We learned
to draw flying birds and bounding deer and floating swans with scrolls
in their beaks, all without lifting pen from paper. Some of us learned
to do it almost as well as the accomplished Mr. Gaskell himself, and
almost all of us showed marked improvement in penmanship. Doubtless
Truman Baird did not, he being engrossed with oratory, striving to
reproduce, "Hate--the right foot advanced, the face turned to the sky,
the gaze directed upward with a fierce expression, the eyes full of a
baleful light," or other phases of passion duly set down.
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