.. about your
going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I
considered I ought to see you about it."
I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have
a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew
all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about
the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their
farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there. I avowed that
there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored
professors and students.
My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these
wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they
were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to
me the proverb of "birds of a feather."
* * * * *
Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away
behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making
immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been
barren of fruit.
"Sh! sit down a minute and wait." His wife was coming downstairs,
querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.
"Laddie has just died."
"The shepherd dog?" I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.
"Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was.
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