“Cry I must, Grannie, when I see it looking so beautiful. Warm towels, you say? I'm a girl of this sort—when I get my heart down, I can never get it up again. Fuller's earth, is it? Here, then.”
“Boo—loo—loo! the bog millish! Nancy, we must be shortening her soon.”
And with that they fell to an earnest council on frocks and petticoats, and other mysteries unread by man. Pete sat and watched and listened. “People will be crying shame on her if they see the Grannie doing everything,” he thought.
That night he lounged through the town and examined the shop windows out of the corner of his eye. He was trying to bear himself like a workman enjoying his Saturday night's ramble in clean clothes, but the streets were thronged, and he found himself observed. “Not here,” he told himself. “I can buy nothing here. Doesn't do to be asleep at all, and a man isn't always in bed when he's sleeping.”
Some hours later, Nancy and the child being upstairs, Pete bethought himself of something that was kept at the bottom of a drawer. Going to the drawer to open it, he found it stiff to his tugging, and it came back with a jerk, which showed it had not lately been disturbed. Pete found what he looked for, and came upon something beside. It was a cardboard box, tied about with a string, which was knotted in a peculiar way. “Kate's knot,” thought Pete with a sigh. He slipped it, and opened the lid and took out a baby's hood of scarlet plush. “The very thing,” he thought. He held it, mouth open, over his big brown hand, and laughed with delight. “She's been buying it for the child and never using it.” His eyes glistened. “The very thing,” he thought, and then he took down pen and paper to write something to go with it.
This is what he wrote—
“For lil Katerin from her Luvin mother”
Then he held it at arm's length and looked at it. The subscription crossed the whole face of a half-sheet of paper. But the triumphant success of his former effort had made him bold. He could not resist the temptation to write more. So he turned the paper over and wrote on the back—
“tell pa pa not to wurry about me i aspect to be home sune
but dont no ezactly”
His eyes were swimming by the time he got that down, but they brightened again as he remembered something.