Hood River, Oregon.
I have never seen a letter in the Post-office Box from this place, so I thought I would write. I have taken Harper's Young People since November, and like to read it very much. We are spending our vacation here, but our home is in Portland, Oregon. We are only about fifteen miles from Mount Hood, and we can also see Mount Adams very plainly from here. Most of our trees are pine, but there are a great many oaks too. We have lots of fun swinging on their long branches. My brother and another man killed a rattlesnake with six rattles the other day. We eat out-of-doors, in a dining-room made of small pine-trees and boughs. We have a horse whose name is Silly. There are five girls in our family and two boys. My baby brother is three months old, and we think he is the dearest baby in the world. He laughs right out loud sometimes. I have been trying to learn something else besides what I find in my books at school, but all that I have yet learned to do well is to darn stockings and make biscuits.
Dora D. E.
If you can make good biscuits, light and sweet, and darn stockings well, you are quite a little housekeeper already.
Gallipolis, Ohio.
I have not been taking Young People very long. But my father bought a few copies when he was at Richmond, Virginia, about two or three months ago, and I liked them so much that he gave me a subscription for a birthday present. I have not many pets, but my grandmother, who lives next door to us, has a fountain about eighteen feet round, and she has some gold-fish. They are the largest that were ever seen in this city. They are about ten or twelve inches long, and they will jump out of the water for something to eat if you hold it in your fingers. They have two little ones, which appeared in the spring. At first they were quite dark, very nearly black, and then they turned a pale yellow on their sides, and finally became a golden color. The four fish came all the way from Cincinnati in a quart bucket, and now you could not get one of them into a bucket so small. They lived all through the cold winter, and many and many a morning the thermometer was down below zero, and the fountain was frozen over. They would not eat our food through the winter, and they must have lived on insects or on air.
Edward S. A., Jun.