You already know the worst about my leanings to Papacy; but to-day I propose to set your mind at rest on an idea with which you have hypnotized yourself—namely, that I am going to die of malnutrition during what you are pleased to term the "long Arctic winter." I have no intention of starving, and as for the "long Arctic winter," I do not believe there is any such beast, as the farmer said when he looked at the kangaroo in the circus.
I was sitting by my window quietly sewing the other day (that sentence alone should reveal to you how many miles I have travelled from your tutelage) when I overheard one of the children stoutly defending what I took at first to be my character. The next sentence disabused me—it was my figure under discussion.
"She's not fat!" averred Topsy. "I'll smack you if you says it again."
"Well," muttered David, the light of reason being thus forcibly borne in upon him, "she may not be 'zactly fat, but she's fine and hearty."
Not Fat, but Fine and Hearty
If this is the case, and my mirror all too plainly confirms the verdict, and the summer has not waned, what will the "last estate of that woman be," after the winter has passed over her? They tell me that every one here puts on fat in the cold weather as a kind of windproof jacket. I enclose a photograph of me on landing, so you may remember me as I was.
No, you need not worry either over communications in the winter. You really ought to have an intimate acquaintance with our telegraph service, after you have, so to speak, subsidized it during the past three months. It runs in winter as well as summer; and I see no prospect of its closing if you keep it on such a sound financial basis. Moreover, the building is devoted to the administration of the law in all its branches. One half of it is the post and telegraph office, while the other serves as the jail. The whole structure is within a stone's throw of the church and school, as if the corrective institutions of the place believed in intensive cultivation. But to return to the jail. The walls are very thin, and every sound from it can be plainly heard in the telegraph office adjoining. Friday morning the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in competition with the mail steamer's winch rather than with Delilah's "bawling."