But Edwin is rearing and champing for me to go walking with him, and I must also look up these dear girls I am chaperoning, so good-by, my dear sister-in-law. My best love to "that 'ere Kent," as Aunt Mary used to call him. Poor old Aunt Mary! How we shall miss her!
Yours with all the love in the world,
Molly Brown Green.
To Dr. James Allison, Milton, Va., from Page Allison.
Meeting Street,
Charleston, S. C.
I can't get over how good it was in you to let me go tripping with the Tuckers. It has been a wonderful experience, and we are having the most gorgeous time. Already, of course, we have plunged into adventures, as is always the case if you train with the Tucker twins. I am not going to tell you of these adventures until I come back to Bracken; they are too thrilling for mere pen and ink.
As you see by the above address, we have left the hotel and are now installed in a boarding-house on Meeting Street. It seems absurd to call such a place a boarding-house—indeed, a sacrilege. It has just become a boarding-house in the last twelve hours, as I am sure we are the first "paying guests" the poor Misses Laurens have ever had.
We are being chaperoned by a perfectly lovely young woman, a Mrs. Edwin Green. She and her husband were at the hotel and we scraped up an acquaintance with them, and as Mr. Tucker had to go over to Columbia on business she offered to look after us while he was away. Tweedles and I have not been chaperoned before to any great extent, as Miss Cox was our one experience, and we think chaperones are pretty nice, lots nicer than we had been led to expect. Certainly no one could be more charming than Miss Cox, unless it were this lovely Mrs. Green. In the first place, she is so sympathetic, then she is so kind, then she is so pretty, then she is so intelligent and so extremely well-bred,—on top of it all she has married one of the nicest men I ever saw; he really is almost as nice as Mr. Tucker and you. (I should have said you and Mr. Tucker, but you were an afterthought, as you well know!)
Afterthought or not, I do wish you were here, my dearest father. You would delight in the quaintness of this old city. I am getting all the postal cards I can find, which I will not send you, but will bring you, and make you sit down and listen to me while I tell you all about it. I am also going to bring you a volume of Henry Timrod's poetry, which you must duly appreciate, as it was difficult to find it. It seems that although the South Carolinians are very proud of him, none of them have seen fit to get out a new edition of his poetry, and the old editions are very expensive. This I was told by the very pleasant man who has opened a second-hand book shop here.
I found a book there I was crazy to get for you, but as it was a first edition, and that a limited one, I could not afford it. By an amusing chance it has since become my property. I will tell you about that some day. It is entitled "Purely Original Verse," by J. Gordon Coogler. He, too, was a South Carolinian, and such ridiculous stuff you have never imagined. The kind man who owned the shop let me copy a few of the poems before I dreamed of possessing the book. What do you think of these?
A Couplet