Jasper County Democrat, Volume 18, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1915 — WALT MASON [ARTICLE]

WALT MASON

The Poet Philosopher. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to be the dad of an obtrusive, cultured youth, an educated lad. You labored with the farming tool, and spent a vast amount, that Clarence Claude might go to school, and drink at learning’s fount. And now that you are old and bent, no comfort do you know, for when you mutter “I have went,” proud Clarence shrieks with woe. “Come off your perch, oh, Father John,” says Clarence, grim as fate; ‘‘the proper phrase is ‘I have gone’—why don’t you get it straight?” And when you murmur, “I have saw,” the crime’s too rank for jeers; you hit poor Clarence on the raw, he sheds unmanly tears. At last your tongue has ceased to clack; you now refuse to talk, through deadly fear that you will back poor grammar off the walk. Sometimes you argue with the mules, since children are a frost, or ask the horses if the schools are

worth all that they cost. But in the house you close your trap, for if you say a word, young Clarence Claude, that cultured chap, will be profoundly stirred. •