Wishing you a journey south as safe as His Ways how strange, may allow, I wait your arrival in a Spirit happily rescu'd by your universally good Name, from all Imps of the Apprehensive,— an Exception most welcome, in the generally uneasy Life of
y'r obdt. Svt.,
Charles Mason
* * * * * * * * * *
Line 91 Vulgarized:
God bless your journey on the road, if it be His will and not one of those weird moments of His will where He determines maybe you need to suffer a badger attack or some other insanity. I'm thrilled to hear you'll be joining us (probably because you wrote so kindly of me and not because I actually knew who you were before hand). Knowing you'll be my assistant has eased my anxiety, something which happens far too little in my poor life.
Yours truly,
Charlie Mason
Subtext:
Mason is an anxious and generally depressed man who can't even gather enough confidence to wish somebody "Godspeed" without also pointing out that he has no control over God's actual wishes and that sometimes God is kind of a jerk. The amount of stomach trouble this poor guy must go through over possible catastrophes looming in his future must be off the scale. How much teeth grinding and garment rending was he doing over the appointment of an assistant on his journey?
I'm not generally an anxious person but I get Mason's unease about the choice of person who will be traveling with him for such an extended period of time. He seems happy about it, for the moment, in this letter. But Dixon is almost certainly going to annoy him to no end when he arrives, especially since everybody now knows he was lying his ass off in the letter.
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