“Good night. Your sleepy Dorothy, but always loving you the best of all the world.
“P. S.—The funniest thing happened after supper. Two the funniest ones. The bashful-bugler, that’s Melvin, slipped something into my hand and said: ‘That’s to remember me by, a keepsake, if anything should happen to me out in the woods. I bought it for you that day in Digby.’ When I opened the little box there was one those weeny-wiggley sort of silver fishes, they call the ‘Digby chickens,’ that I’d wanted to take home to Alfy. But I shan’t take her this; I shall keep it. ’Cause Molly wants one, too, and when we get our next month’s allowance, if we get it, we can write and buy some by mail.
“The other funny thing was one of those grown up ‘boys.’ He asked me to play for him and had me stand right near him. When I got through he looked over at the Judge and nodded his head. Two, three times he nodded it and then he said, just like this he said it: ‘It is the most remarkable likeness I ever saw. You’re on the right track Schuy, I’m sure of it!’ And the Judge cried real pleased, ‘Hurray!’
“They two were little boys together, down in the south where they lived and they know Mrs. Cecil Calvert real well. And the other ‘boy’ said: ‘Aunt Betty’d ought to be spanked—same as she’s spanked me a heap of times.’
“I wonder if it was I ‘resembled’ anybody and who! I wonder why any gentleman should say such a dreadful impolite thing about that dear old lady! I wonder,—Oh, Father John! Your little girl so often wonders many, many things! Good night at last. Molly calls real cross and I must go.
“Dolly.”
Dorothy’s letters to Mother Martha were equally descriptive though not so long. One ran thus:
“Dearest Mother Martha:—
“You ought to see this farm where we’re living now. It’s so big and has so many cattle and men working, and orchards and potato-fields. They call the potatoes ‘Bluenoses’ just as they call the Nova Scotia folks. The house is part stone and part wood. The stone part was built ever and ever so long ago; strong so the man who built it could protect himself against the Indians. The man was English, and he was a Grimm; an ancestor of this Mr. Grimm we board with. The Indians were Micmacs and friends of the French. Seems if they were all fighting all together all the time, which should own the land. Mrs. Grimm says there have been a good many generations live here though all are gone now except her husband and herself. They are more than seventy years, both of them, but they don’t act one bit old. She cooks and tends to things though she has two, three maids to help her. He rides horseback all over his farm and jumps off his horse and works with the men. Sometimes he drives the ox-carts with the hay and lets us ride.
“I did want you that last Saturday in Halifax. The day your letter came to me with the one dollar in it. I expect you wanted I should buy something to bring you with it but I didn’t. Listen. It was what they called a ‘green market’ morning. Rained of course, or was terrible foggy between showers. The market is just a lot of Indians and negroes, and a few white people sitting round on the edge of the sidewalk all around a big building. The Judge told me many of them had come from across the harbor, miles beyond it, so far that they’d had to walk half the night to bring their stuff to market. Think of that! And such funny stuff it was. Green peas shelled in little measures, ready to cook. (I wish they’d have them that way in our own Lexington market at home!) Wild strawberries—I didn’t see any other kind, no big ones like we have in Baltimore or at home. The berries were hulled and put into little home-made birch-bark baskets that the Indian women make themselves, just pinned together at the end with a thorn or stick. Auntie Lu bought some for us but Miss Greatorex wouldn’t let me eat the berries, though I was just suffering to! She said after they’d been handled by those dirty Indian fingers she knew they were full of microbes or things and she didn’t dare. Oh! dear! I wish she didn’t feel so terrible responsible for my health, ’cause it spoils a lot of my good times. The boys weren’t afraid of microbes and they ate the berries but I have the basket. It will be all I have to bring you from Halifax; because one of those Indian women had her baby with her and she looked so poor—I just couldn’t help giving that dollar right to her. I couldn’t really help it. She wanted me to take baskets in pay for it, but I knew that wouldn’t be giving. You won’t mind, will you, dearest Mother Martha? if the only thing I bring you from that city is a poor Indian woman’s blessing? You always give to the poor yourself, so I wasn’t afraid you’d scold. There are just two things that I’d like different here, on this lovely vacation. One is if only you and father were here, too! Every new and nice thing I see, or good time I have, I do so want them for you both also. The other is—I wish, I wish I knew who my father and mother were! The real ones. They couldn’t have been any nicer than you have been to me, but folks that don’t know me are sure to ask me about my family. Molly and Monty and Melvin are always able to tell about theirs, but I can’t. Her mother, the ‘other Molly,’ died when she was a little thing, but she knows all about her. The Judge has a beautiful miniature of this ‘other Molly’ his wife, and takes it with him wherever he goes, even into that camp, where we’re to be let to go, maybe, for a salmon dinner that the ‘Boys’ catch themselves.