“There are lots of books in this old house and a piano. Each generation has added to the library and Mrs. Grimm says that in the winter she and her husband read ’most all the time. Christmases, no matter how deep the snow, all their children come home and then the rooms are opened and warmed and they have such fun. Oh! it must be grand to belong to a big family and know it’s all your own! They burn great logs of wood and even now we have a fire on the living-room hearth all the time. One of the young Indian boys who works here has nothing else for his chores except to keep the wood-boxes filled and the fires fresh. He’s rather a nice Indian boy but he’s full of capers. Molly is so lonesome without Monty and Melvin to play with she makes plays with Anton. I don’t think Mrs. Grimm likes it and I’m sure Aunt Lucretia doesn’t, for I heard her tell Molly so. But nobody can keep Molly Breckenridge still. She doesn’t care to read much and she hates practicing, and she cries every time she has to sew a seam, though Mrs. Hungerford makes her do that ‘for discipline.’ I don’t know what would become of the darling if it wasn’t for Anton. She likes me, course, but I can’t climb trees after cherries, or wade in ponds after water-lilies, and though I like to ride horseback with her I’m afraid to go beyond bounds where we’re told to stay. Molly isn’t afraid.
“Please give my love to Aunt Chloe and write soon to your loving
“Dorothy.”
Having finished this letter, longer than common, Dorothy wandered out of doors seeking her mate. She was nowhere in sight, but the man who rode into town so many miles away, to fetch and carry the mail and to bring supplies of such things as the farm did not produce, was just driving up the road and playfully shook his mail-pouch at her. She sped to meet him, was helped into his wagon and received the pouch in her arms. She and Molly were always eager to “go meet the mail,” which was brought to them only every other day, and whichever was first and obtained it was given the key to the pouch and the privilege of distributing its contents. This privilege would be Dorothy’s to-day; and she skipped into the living-room and to the ladies at their sewing, dragging the pouch behind her.
Little she knew of its contents; or that among them would come the solution of that “wonder” that now so constantly tormented her:—“Who were my parents?”
CHAPTER XIII
A MESSAGE FOR THE CAMP
When the gray-haired “Boys” had set out for camp, they had left word at the farm that they wished no newspapers or mail matter of that sort forwarded them. Also, most of them had, before leaving their own homes, asked that no letters should be written except such as were important, and these should be duly marked that. They wished to forget care and the outside world as far as possible, and to live in the faith that “no news is good news.”