Felisces Pascuas, Sally dear! You in the snow and I in fairyland! It's a comic opera Christmas here, but a very fetching one,—the pretty processions of singing children through the streets, the gay, grotesque piñatis—huge paper dolls filled with dulces, the childish and merry little people, the color, the music, the smile and the sob of it all!
I wish I could have little Dolores Tristeza with me. I sent her a box of delights.
My pussy willow girl is star-eyed over a telegram and my much more than civil engineer has told me what he wants for Christmas. If he had told me on Fifth Avenue or at home, on Wetherby Ridge, I should have said at once that I was sorry, and I liked him immensely, and so on, but—but here, in Cuernavaca, in the Borda Gardens, beside the crumbling pinky palace, where the ghosts of Maximilian and Carlotta walk at the full of the moon, when he told me that all his days were wooden beads before I came, and—I don't know, Sally! I don't know! New York seems very far away ... Rodney Harrison and my St. Michael seem palely unreal.... Can it be possible, in these gay little weeks, that, as Lupe would say, "I have arrive'" to love this boy?
Distractedly,
Jane.
Orizaba.
My Dear Sally,
In the market place to-day I found such a bored old bear dancing for a bored crowd. I've never seen anything quite so tired and patient as his eyes. His little old master was half asleep but he whacked his tambourine and whined his mournful song without a pause. I left Lupe and the C.E. and went out and patted the bear and asked the man (I am as handy as that with my Spanish!) how much he earned in a day. Less than fifteen cents in our money! Well, I asked him if I could buy the bear a week's vacation if I paid him three weeks' earnings in advance. He accepted thankfully and I believe he will keep his word, being just as bored as the bear. The old beast came down on his four feet with a gusty sigh and they padded peacefully away. The crowd thought me mildly mad and the C.E. was a little annoyed with me. He said he would gladly have attended to it for me if I had asked him. I answered him very impertinently—something Lupe had taught me—"Cuando tu vas, ya yo vengo!" which means in crude English, "By the time you get started I'll be on the way back!"
I purr with pleasure when I think of the bear!