Part 10 of 14: Memories of Long Ago
by Hiram Ellsworth Pearsall
Babe, as we called him, was a little bright-eyed boy of about four years of age. He was full of life and laughter, much like any boy of his age.
Babe lived across the street from the little confectionery store where we could see him daily cross the street from his home and pass by the store. A couple of doors down the street we could see Babe enter his father’s shop. Very soon Babe would be back to the store with a penny, and say, “I want a chocolate, and put it in a sack.” When the chocolate was put in the little confectionery bag, Babe would go home happy. During the summer months this happened almost daily. But fall came, and the rains came to turn the dust on the streets into mud. The teams with wagons soon had made Main Street into one great mudhole.
We soon saw that Babe had found a new pleasure. We saw that if there was anything Babe liked better than mud to play in, it was more mud. Daily, we would see Babe playing in the mud in the street.
Early one morning, Babe came across the street as usual, entered the store and stood grinning as we admired his new pair of rubber boots his father had bought for him. He ran out into the street trying out his new boots in the mud.
A short time after we saw Babe standing in the door. He was barefooted, his clothes were wet and his hands and face were covered with mud. Babe was crying, saying “I lost my boots.” When we looked out in the street we could only see the tops of his boots sticking out of the water in the mudhole. His boots had stuck in the mud, so he just walked out of them and left them fast in the mud.
We went out and fished the boots out of the mud, poured the water out, then, while we were putting the chocolate drop in a sack, Babe put on his boots again, took his candy and started home, happy as a lark.
–transcribed from the 1944 Monroe Monitors by Nellie Robertson