From Van Dweller to Commuter Author:Albert Bigelow Paine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. Learning by Experience. DAY by day, and piece by piece, our purchases appeared. Now and then a delivery wagon would drive up in hot haste and deliver ... more »a stew-pan, or perhaps a mouse trap. At last, and on the third day, a mattress. Of course, I had been down and protested, ere this. The cheerful liar at the transfer desk had been grieved, astonished, thunderstruck at my tale. He would investigate, and somebody would be discharged, at once. This thought soothed me. It was blood that I wanted. Just plain blood, and plenty of it. Iknow now that it was the transfer- man's blood that I needed, but for the moment I was appeased and believed in him. Our matting, promised within two hours from the moment of purchase, was the last thing to arrive. This on the fourth day—or was it the fifth ? I was too mad by this time to remember dates. What I do recall is that we laid it ourselves. We had not, as yet, paid for the laying, and we said that rather than give that shameless firm another dollar we would lay that matting if it killed us. Morally it did. I have never been quite the same man since that terrible experience. The Little Woman helped stretch, and held the lamp, while I pounded my thumb and swore. She said she had never realized until that night how well and satisfactorily I couldswear. It seemed to comfort her and she abetted it. I know now that the stripes on matting never match. We didn't know it then, and we tried to make them. We pulled and hauled, and I got down on my stomach, with one ear against the wall, and burned the other one on the lamp chimney which the Little Woman, in her anxiety to help, held too close. When I criticised her inclination to overdo matters, she observed that I would probably be able to pull the matting along more easily if I wouldn'...« less