The bread was not a worthy invitation. I varied it with a fragment of ham.

Mr. Squirrel wasn’t void-stomached.

I thought he needed something to read. I tore a poem from the wall. I left it by his respectable cavern.

Lo!

His head sprouted out to pull it in.

“Aha, even the squirrel is a poetry devotee, in this hill!” I said in humourous mood.

18th—

“Most Beloved:

“Mamma was flogged with a bamboo rod some hundred times when she was a girl, her exchanging of a word with a boy over the fence being deemed an obscenity. My papa spent his lonely days in a room with Confucious till one night a middleman left him with my mamma as with a dolly. I do believe they never wrote any love letter.

“What would they say, I wonder, if they knew that their daughter had taken to Love-Letter Writing as a profession in Amerikey?