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Feb 5.57 Dear Jack -

   Thank you for the ever-lovin' buck, and more so in view of the fact you deprived yourself to send it.  I wish I could be like those accomplished burglars who have buckets of rubies hidden away for just such painful emergencies.   If time doesn't run out on me, I may someday graduate to such eminence and expertise - trouble is that in this school, every wrong answer is screeching disaster.
   I blame it on the Miltown.  Having gulped it injudiciously all Xmas day, I was not only tranquillized but paralyzed.   And filled with such a glacial calm that it is a mercy the banks were closed, I was indomitable and fearless.
   The recklessness was a thing that had been building for some time of course.   The pressures and annoyances of a commercial Yuletide in all its shrill avarice, the frenzy of it, contributed much to the mood.  Even the Salvation Army, always dependable, always a sad and wistful little note in all the garishness, blossomed out in plastic-type shelters and microphones, electronically, deafeningly, beseeching.  Gone were the tripod and kettle, the pleasant small tinkling bell.
   And I wondered what Madison Ave. lout had conceived in his gray-flanneled brain the streamlining of the ancient rite of alms-giving.
   There were other irritations.  The noble art of boosting, always the prime sport of the season, was all but ruined by the crafty ? Dance of these Pharisees.  Ruined, too, by hordes of amateurs.  It got so that one had to tear an article from the competing grasp of some beardless