“The cook cooks on a gas stove that is very funny. I asked her how it went and she showed me it. She is going to leve, but lucky thing the hired girl can cook till Aunt Beulah gets a nother cook as antyseptic as this cook. In Rogers College they teach ladies to have their cook’s and hired girl’s antyseptic. It is a good idear becase of sickness. I inclose a recipete for a good cake. You can make it sating down. You don’t have to stir it much, and Grandpa can bring you the things. I will write soon. I hope you are all 51 right. Let me hear that you are all right. Don’t forget to put the cat out nights. I hope she is all right, but remember the time she stole the butter fish. I miss you, and I miss the cat around. Uncle David pays me my salary out of his own pocket, because he is the richest, but I like Uncle Peter the best. He is very handsome and we like to talk to each other the best. Goodbye, Eleanor.”
But it was on the varicolored pages of a ruled tablet—with a picture on its cover of a pink cheeked young lady beneath a cherry tree, and marked in large straggling letters also varicolored “The Cherry Blossom Tablet”—that Eleanor put down her most sacred thoughts. On the outside, just above the cherry tree, her name was written with a pencil that had been many times wet to get the desired degree of blackness, “Eleanor Hamlin, Colhassett, Massachusetts. Private Dairy,” and on the first page was this warning in the same painstaking, heavily shaded chirography, “This book is sacrid, and not be trespased in or read one word of. By order of owner. E. H.”
It was the private diary and Gwendolyn, the rabbit doll, and a small blue china shepherdess 52 given her by Albertina, that constituted Eleanor’s lares et penates. When David had finally succeeded in tracing the ancient carpetbag in the lost and found department of the cab company, Eleanor was able to set up her household gods, and draw from them that measure of strength and security inseparable from their familiar presence. She always slept with two of the three beloved objects, and after Beulah had learned to understand and appreciate the child’s need for unsupervised privacy, she divined that the little girl was happiest when she could devote at least an hour or two a day to the transcribing of earnest sentences on the pink, blue and yellow pages of the Cherry Blossom Tablet, and the mysterious games that she played with the rabbit doll. That these games consisted largely in making the rabbit doll impersonate Eleanor, while the child herself became in turn each one of the six uncles and aunts, and exhorted the victim accordingly, did not of course occur to Beulah. It did occur to her that the pink, blue and yellow pages would have made interesting reading to Eleanor’s guardians, if they had been privileged to read all that was chronicled there.
“My aunt Beulah wears her hair to high of her forrid.
“My aunt Margaret wears her hair to slic on the sides.
“My aunt Gertrude wears her hair just about right.
“My aunt Margaret is the best looking, and has the nicest way.