“I have three cantos of The White Lady finished. I have the heroin imured in a convent and I dont know how to get her out because I am not a Catholic. I suppose it would have been better if I had a Protestant heroin but there were no Protestants in the days of shivalry. I might have asked Lofty John last year but this year I cant because Ive never spoken to him since he played that horrid joke on me about the apple. When I meet him on the road I look straight ahead just as lofty as he does. I have called my pig after him to get square. Cousin Jimmy has given me a little pig for my own. When it is sold I am to have the money. I mean to give some for missionaries and put the rest in the bank to go to my educashun. And I thought if I ever had a pig I would call it Uncle Wallace. But now it does not seem to me propper to call pigs after your uncles even if you dont like them.
“Teddy and Perry and Ilse and I play we are living in the days of shivalry and Ilse and I are distressed damsels reskued by galant knites. Teddy made a splendid suit of armor out of old barrel staves and then Perry made a better one out of old tin boilers hammered flat with a broken saucepan for a helmit. Sometimes we play at the Tansy Patch. I have a queer feeling that Teddys mother hates me this summer. Last summer she just didnt like me. Smoke and Buttercup are not there now. They disappeared misteriously in the winter. Teddy says he feels sure his mother poisoned them because she thought he was getting too fond of them. Teddy is teaching me to whistle but Aunt Laura says it is unladylike. So many jolly things seem to be unladylike. Sometimes I almost wish my aunts were infidels like Dr. Burnly. He never bothers whether Ilse is unladylike or not. But no, it would not be good manners to be an infidel. It would not be a New Moon tradishun.
“Today I taught Perry that he must not eat with his knife. He wants to learn all the rules of etiket. And I am helping him learn a recitation for school examination day. I wanted Ilse to do it but she was mad because he asked me first and she wouldnt. But she should because she is a far better reciter than I am. I am too nervus.
“June 14.
“Dear Father, we have composition in school now and I learned today that you put in things like this “ ” when you write anything anybody has said. I didnt know that before. I must go over all my letters to you and put them in. And after a question you must put a mark like this ? and when a letter is left out a postroffe which is a comma up in the air. Miss Brownell is sarkastic but she does teach you things. I am putting that down because I want to be fair even if I do hate her. And she is interesting although she is not nice. I have written a descripshun of her on a letter-bill. I like writing about people I don’t like better than about those I do like. Aunt Laura is nicer to live with than Aunt Elizabeth, but Aunt Elizabeth is nicer to write about. I can deskribe her fawlts but I feel wikked and ungrateful if I say anything that is not compelmentary about dear Aunt Laura. Aunt Elizabeth has locked your books away and says I’m not to have them till I’m grown up. Just as if I wouldn’t be careful of them, dear Father. She says I wouldn’t because she found that when I was reading one of them I put a tiny pencil dot under every beautiful word. It didn’t hurt the book a bit, dear Father. Some of the words were dingles, pearled, musk, dappled, intervales, glen, bosky, piping, shimmer, crisp, beechen, ivory. I think those are all lovely words, Father.
“Aunt Laura lets me read her copy of A Pilgrims Progress on Sundays. I call the big hill in the road to White Cross the Delectable Mountain because it is such a beautiful one.
“Teddy lent me 3 books of poetry. One of them was Tennyson and I have learned The Bugle Song off by heart so I will always have it. One was Mrs. Browning. She is lovely. I would like to meet her. I suppose I will when I die but that may be a long time away. The other was just one poem called Sohrab and Rustum. After I went to bed I cried over it. Aunt Elizabeth said “what are you sniffling about?” I wasn’t sniffling—I was weeping sore. She made me tell her and then she said “You must be crazy.” But I couldn’t go to sleep until I had thought out a different end for it—a happy one.
“June 25.
“Dear Father: