The morning after the Hampton expedition, Catherine struggled awake from dreams of book-lined trains, with Miss Adams and Elsmere as engineer and fireman, to open her eyes gratefully upon the substantial reality of her own great room in its fresh bareness. At the foot of her big carved bed, the broad window open to its utmost seemed to bring all out-of-doors within the room. A squirrel whisked his tail across the sill as he scurried in and out of the branches of the window-oak where a grosbeak and a wren chatted sociably. The sunshine through the leafy boughs lighted the bare floor and rested on the great writing table in the center of the room and on the high dark dresser. Catherine’s gaze, following the light, rested at last upon the low bookcases filling the chimney corners.
“I can spare one Child’s Garden of Verses,” she mused, “and that second Little Women. I wish they could have the Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway picture-books, but I couldn’t possibly let them go. I loved those little urchins in the children’s room,–especially that curly-headed little 35 boy reading a bound Wide-Awake–O!” She sat up in bed and tossed her thick braids back. “I wonder if I ought? Or even if I could?” Out of bed she slipped, and crossed the room to the bookcases. Opening one, she ran her finger-tips tenderly along the stout backs of a row of dark red volumes. “My very own Wide-Awakes! What a storehouse they would be for the little folk! They needn’t be allowed to circulate, so they’d not wear out badly. They could just come in and read them there. I was going to give them my little rocking-chair, anyhow. O, dear! I’m afraid I’m really going to let them have you, you dear, dear books. It would be selfish to keep you up here all the time, when I almost never open you. Nobody shall have this one, though, with Hannah’s letter in it.”
She turned the pages of one of the latest volumes and paused at a neat little paragraph:
“Dear Wide-Awake:
“I have been taking you ever since I was a child. I will be fourteen my next birthday. I like you very much. I would like to correspond with any one who is about my age. I have no brothers and sisters, and get very lonely. I have read all Miss Alcott, but I wish she had let Jo marry Laurie. I like the Wide-Awake stories. Please have a good long one about boarding-school 36in the next number. I like Dickens, but I can’t bear Scott. I know John Gilpin and Baby Bell by heart, and I am in the eighth grade. I like skating and rowing. There is a fine pond near us.
“Your loving reader,
“Violet Ethelyn Eldred.
“P. S. Nobody knows that I am writing this letter, so please print it soon to surprise them.”
Catherine kissed the page and closed the book. “Isn’t it too unbelievable that that queer little letter with that ridiculous fancy name at the end should have done so much? Violet Ethelyn Eldred! It hasn’t nearly so pleasant a sound to me now as Hannah. And the child thought no one would write to her if she signed her own name,–it was so ‘homely’! Ah me! I suppose I should be getting dressed instead of sitting about in the sunshine, mooning. I wonder if Inga will remember the muffins for breakfast.”