We have had a warm, pleasant winter here. I found the first buttercup on the 8th of January, and now (April 10) there are quantities of buttercups and wild pansies, and a few days ago I found two wild larkspurs. This time last year the snow was between four and six feet deep.
I have a dear little kitten named Frisky, and she deserves her name, for a more playful little thing I never saw. She loves to play with a ball of yarn. Sometimes she will get angry with it and kick it, then she will hug it, then she will bite and kick it again. We have another kitten named Beauty. He is not so playful as Frisky, but sometimes she will coax him to play, and if you could only hear the noise they make when they chase each other across the floor, you would think they were two little mules instead of two little cats. I often call Beauty "Professor," because he is such a serious kitten. He will sit still and stare at a thing so long, and he has such very big round eyes!
Mary A. R.
Chicago, Illinois.
I am nine years old. I go to Lincoln School. I want to tell Young People about our temperance meeting we have every Wednesday afternoon. We call ourselves the Band of Hope, because our teacher says we are the hope of the nation. She reads to us how alcohol hurts the brain and the health, and does not allow one to be a strong man. Then we have singing, and say the Lord's Prayer. Before we go home the young ladies give us papers. From sixty to seventy boys meet every week. We are going to try to have a reading-room for the bigger boys.
I hope all the children will read this letter, and I want lots of boys to have temperance meetings, as we do.
James McD.
Waterbury, Vermont.
In Young People No. 77, G. H. inquired how much sap it takes to make a pound of maple sugar. My papa has a sugar orchard of three hundred trees, and has made seventeen hundred pounds of sugar this year. He says it takes from fourteen to twenty quarts of sap to make a pound of sugar.
M. H. M.