“I am glad you think it is easier to keep your pledge now. I made a New Year’s resolution to go without chocolates, and give the money they would cost to some good cause, but it’s hard to pick out a cause, or to decide exactly how much money you are saving. I can eat the chocolates that are sent to me, however!!!!
“Uncle David said that he thought you were not like yourself lately, but you seemed just the same to me Christmas, only more affectionate. I love you very much. I was really only joking about the chocolates. Eleanor.”
“Dear Uncle David:
“I was glad to get your nice letter. You did not have to write in response to my bread and butter letter, but I am glad you did. When I am at school, and getting letters all the time I feel as if I were living two beautiful lives all at once, the 183 life of a ‘cooperative child’ and the life of Eleanor Hamlin, schoolgirl, both together. Letters make the people you love seem very near to you, don’t you think they do? I sleep with all my letters under my pillow whenever I feel the least little bit homesick, and they almost seem to breathe sometimes.
“School is the same old school. Maggie Lou had a wrist watch, too, for Christmas, but not so pretty as the one you gave me. Miss Hadley says I do remarkable work in English whenever I feel like it. I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or not. I took Kris Kringle for the subject of a theme the other day, and represented him as caught in an iceberg in the grim north, and not being able to reach all the poor little children in the tenements and hovels. The Haddock said it showed imagination.
“There was a lecture at school on Emerson the other day. The speaker was a noted literary lecturer from New York. He had wonderful waving hair, more like Pader—I can’t spell him, but you know who I mean—than Uncle Jimmie’s, but a little like both. He introduced some very noble thoughts in his discourse, putting perfectly 184 old ideas in a new way that made you think a lot more of them. I think a tall man like that with waving hair can do a great deal of good as a lecturer, because you listen a good deal more respectfully than if they were plain looking. His voice sounded a good deal like what I imagine Romeo’s voice did. I had a nice letter from Madam Bolling. I love you, and I have come to the bottom of the sheet. Eleanor.”
“Dear Uncle Peter:
“I have just written to my other uncles, so I won’t write you a long letter this time. They deserve letters because of being so unusually prompt after the holidays. You always deserve letters, but not specially now, any more than any other time.