We Must Save Jepson! (A Novella) by Mark Petersen

Author:Mark Petersen [Petersen, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mark Petersen
Published: 2020-07-23T16:14:33+00:00

LETTER XI.

(To Mrs. Phineas M. Ackley Boggs, London, dated ? May 1888)

Mrs. Boggs—

Do you remember me, ma’am? (Do you remember anything? I should hope not.) Do you teach, still? I endured your Standard V class once—or twice, truth be told—and you oft predicted I would come to no good. Unfairly, you referred to me as “short on brains.” True, I did pretend to read at first by memorising a few sentences. Who knew you would finally note my book was upside-down? (Later, it did turn out that I was in need of spectacles.)

Well, I am in the wilds of Africa now, and I prove you wrong. I sit not under a cardboard dunce cap anymore, but on a camp-stool helmeted under the great outdoors.

I am something of a hero, as it happens.

Our caravan marches through swamps and jungle, through brush and tall mazes of bamboo. Incisions are cut on my tan arms by cannibals, and I flinch not. Not much, anyway. When they attack with barbed spears and arrows, I rally our force with gusto.

You caned me once for holding my pen out of style. Alas, nothing nice ever seemed to happen in your draughty classroom.

From the schoolyard, I do remember one chant: “Eaver weaver, chimney sweeper / had a wife and couldn’t keep her / had another, didn’t love her / up the chimney he did shove her.” If only we could have shoved you up a chimney, ma’am.

Goodbye: I seek a life of the grand manner. We blaze a glorious path through unknown lands.

Yours Sincerely,

Hubert Reginald Huxtable

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