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THE FAMILY ALBUM
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twenty-four dollars, I’ve been afraid that some unprincipled adventurer would marry me for my money.

We never say grandpop, but he remembered us fine. We hard a farm on a flat rock up in Maine. That’s what pop used to say, anyway. Anyway, Jerry went and got married and pop disinherited him without a dime. That’s the only way pop could disinherit anybody, because he didn’t have the dime himself.

Pop wasn’t much of a home man even if he did have fourteen children.

Pop sold wild-hair tweezers. When a man would shave himself he was liable to get an ingrown hair. Then pop would sell him a tweezer. But there wasn’t much of a market for ingrown hairs as people tried to avoid them. Pop endeavored to make them popular but he didn’t succeed much.

Pop had a brother who was kind of lazy, but it wasn’t his fault. He suffered a whole lot from a blighted romance. This fellow, Bill Adams, that I was telling you about last week when you stopped at our house to take off your new Sunday shoes that were pinching you, is the man that caused it.

Pop’s brother’s name was Eb. And Eb used to