"MY DEAR PHIL,—I sent you one letter from Suez, and I now write this from school which I hate, and every moment I wish I was back in your verandah playing with the dogs, and mending your soks. This is a half-holiday and instead of going to the hokky I am scribbling to you. I have so much to tell you. First of all about Mrs. Dawson, she was middling kind to me on borde ship but I ran all messages and sowed buttons on her boots, and brought her brandy when she was very sick. All the time I was making up my mind to _tell her_ about the dresses, I hated to have to do it, but I felt that she ought to know and not have to wonder all her life. So one day when she was awfully ill and week, lying back with her eyes shut, some voice inside my head said _Do it now_, now is the time, she cannot beet you. And I said, Mrs. Dawson I am going to make your mind easy, it was I who cut up all your dresses. I am very sorry, they were beautiful, and if I could give them back now I would. I've nothing to give you to make up with, but my gold bangell, the only nice thing that I have cousin Phil, and that you gave me; so I took it off, and offered it to her. She had opened her eyes ever so wide, and at first looked quite stupid and queer; then she got very red and fierce and wriggled up and panted for breath. At last she said only you are a little orfan I don't know what I would do with you, land you at Malta I believe. There's your bangell and she flung it out of the port hole, and said now tell me you little feend what you did it for. And I told her the truth that it was to punish her for her unkindness to my mummy, and this made her quite crazy. She jumped up, and took me by the shoulders and turned me out of the cabbin. She never speekes to me now, but she has told everyone, and no one ever talks to me, and one child said go away you little cat my mama says I am not to allow you to come near me you ought to be in Jale. So I did not gain much by telling the truth that time you see. I lost all my friends and my dear dear bangell. This school is a big red house with long passages and great bair rooms and a bell rings for everything, getting up prayers lessons play. Oh I do hate that bell. There are forty girls and I am not the youngest only the smallest in the lowest class. Miss Morton thinks me dreadfully bakward, and so I am, except in sowing, but she was surprised to hear that I had read Vanity Fair and Byron's pomes and could say Shelly's skylark by hart. The other girls are very prim, some tell lies as bad as Anima any day, some are greedy, as greedy as Pinky, some are very nice, but they all think me odd and wild. I like to make them stair, so I jabber Hindustani and crack my finger-joints. I have no friends here except the second housemaid the cat and the drill serjant. He says I am made of yres, and he has been in India but only in Madras. I have been in lots of skrapes already dear Phil I don't believe I am