He was a nervous man, and he shuffled from
one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. He would
boil a while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again.
'Look here! What do you suppose I told you the names of those points
for?'
I tremblingly considered a moment, and then the devil of temptation
provoked me to say: -
'Well - to - to - be entertaining, I thought.'
This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was
crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because
he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders
sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as
Mr. Bixby was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who
would TALK BACK. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such
an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and
farther away the scowmen's curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted
his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the
window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and
not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with. Presently he said
to me in the gentlest way -
'My boy, you must get a little memorandum book, and every time I tell
you a thing, put it down right away.
