“Now I must shut, as Frieda said in her last letter!
“Your loving Hannah.”
Catherine gathered up the scattered pages of this voluminous letter and then opened the slender one which had accompanied it. This bore a far western postmark, and its neat little pages resembled copperplate.
“My Dear Roommate:
“I’m waiting for a youth to whom I am to 69 give a toot lesson. He is very stupid. I have him in Greek and English literature. In Greek he translates the word for Lord, ‘Cyrus.’ We have been reading the New Testament, and you can think how very oddly that would come in, in some passages! And in an English test he assured me that Milton wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, and the author of Bacon’s Essays was Charles Lamb. He makes me wonder whether I shall have courage enough to tackle teaching as a profession, if tutoring is so difficult. But I like his money very well, and Mother is going away for a real vacation and will take Cora, and that couldn’t happen if I hadn’t found work this summer.
“I have a Sunday-school class, too, and that is entertaining, at least. It is at a mission, and such queer dirty little chaps as are in it!
“I started in to teach them an alphabet of Christian graces, or desirable qualities. The first week we had A for Attention, and the second, B for Bravery, and the third week I thought they all had the idea, and asked them to guess what C would be. They thought very hard, and then one piped out: ‘Cabbages!’ The same little boy told me that the priests burned insects in the temple!
“My whole letter seems to be nothing but my pupils’ absurdities. But really I have very little else to write about that would interest any one. I’m busy all day, and too tired at night to read or 70 write. I take more pleasure getting acquainted with my darling little brother Jack again, than in anything else I do. He has been Ariel now for a week, and it’s very convenient, for there are many errands to be done. He sleeps at night in a cow-slip bell, very romantically, but I have no hope the spell will last. He will be a robber chief or a street-car conductor next week. The poetry in his system is in streaks, not continuous. O! that reminds me–and it’s the last ‘bright saying’ I shall quote in this letter, I promise you! He asked me rather shyly the other day what poetry was, and after I had attempted to explain, he said: ‘It’s queer, Allie. I thought it was chickens!’
“Here comes my pupil, looking very sad. I wish he didn’t regard me as an old, old woman. I suppose I seem so to him, but I do hate to feel for two hours a day that I have lost all my youth.
“When does Hannah come? And Frieda? I am all eagerness to see her. Did you carry my embroidered waist home with you by any chance? I can’t find it, and I really need it.