The first Saturday there was twenty-seven of us, without counting the girls; there's only three of us now, and the girls are gone.

We drug him to sleep, or he would go wild; then he's all right for another year--thinks she's with him till the last three or four days come round; then he begins to look for her, and gets out his poor old letter, and we come and ask him to read it to us.

Lord, she was a darling!" A HELPLESS SITUATION Once or twice a year I get a letter of a certain pattern, a pattern that never materially changes, in form and substance, yet I cannot get used to that letter--it always astonishes me.

It affects me as the locomotive always affects me: I saw to myself, "I have seen you a thousand times, you always look the same way, yet you are always a wonder, and you are always impossible; to contrive you is clearly beyond human genius--you can't exist, you don't exist, yet here you are!" I have a letter of that kind by me, a very old one.

I yearn to print it, and where is the harm?
The writer of it is dead years ago, no doubt, and if I conceal her name and address--her this-world address--I am sure her shade will not mind.