THE TIM BUNKER PAPERS. 203 



catechism, and our children will be taught &quot;The chief 

 end of man is to fix up.&quot; 



You see in the first place I didn t want to write at all, 

 considering that I understood the use of a plow enuff sight 

 better than the use of the pen, and remembering that old 

 saw &quot; Let the cobbler stick to his last.&quot; I still think 

 there is wisdom in that saying. But, you see, the editor 

 thought I had better write, that I ought not to hide my 

 light under a bushel, and all that sort of thing. He was very 

 civil in his compliments, and what was I that I should set 

 up for knowing more than an editor, and the editor of the 

 Agriculturist, too ? I thought he ought to know what 

 sort of talk would edify farmers, and I didn t pretend to 

 be anything else. So I promised him that I would write 

 for one year, and have kept on ever since. 



Then Mrs. Bunker didn t want me to write ; twould 

 make a public man of me, and folks would come to stare 

 round the house, as if they expected to see a lion in his 

 cage ; lionizing, I believe she called it, and I suppose that 

 was about what she meant. 



Then Sally put in agin my writing; said she should 

 be ashamed to have my letters to her printed, because the 

 spelling was awful. She admitted the sense was good 

 ermff, about equal to any thing they had in boarding 

 school, but the grammar and the spelling wanted fixing. 

 So I had to tell her if the spelling didn t suit her, she 

 might fix it to suit herself. For my part I couldn t see 

 why it wasn t just as well to spell words as they sounded, 

 as to follow the dictionary. I thought plow was about the 

 same tool, whether they spelt it with a w or uyh at the 

 end; one was considerable shorter than the other, and 

 would save ink ; besides, every body would know what I 

 meant, and that was the end of talking or writing, to be 

 understood. But I couldn t convince her by any common- 

 sense arguments, that my spelling was good enuff. 



So &quot; Western Farmer &quot; and the public will see that my 



