"Aunt Lucinda and I came up here yesterday to buy my clothes for school, and also to see what kind of a room I was to have when I come up for good the first of January. "Aunt Lucinda has been awfully nice about everything, letting me get most of the things I wanted. I have some loves of dresses, which I won't take time now to describe, as you will be in Woodford so soon for Christmas and will see them. They will be fresh, too, for Aunt Lucinda says I can't wear any of them until I am at Miss North's. Aunt Lucinda bought me a perfect treasure of a desk--mahogany, with the cunningest shelves underneath for books. She bought me some new books, too--some that I've wanted for a long time. There's 'The Life of Helen Keller;' grandmother has one, and I simply adore it; and Thoreau's 'Week on the Merrimac,' and one or two of Stevenson's--Robert Louis, you know--and a new 'Little Colonel,' my old one is worn to shreds. Oh, yes, and a beautiful new dictionary; it looks too full of information for anything, and there's a perfectly dear atlas with it besides. We got a copy of Helen Hunt's 'Ramona,' too. We don't know yet if Miss North will allow me to have any love stories; but, if she won't, Aunt Lucinda will keep it for me. I wouldn't part with it for anything. We had such fun getting the books; only Aunt Lucinda kept fussing about modern bookstores, and wishing that I might have seen the 'Old Corner Book Store,' where she used to come when she was a girl. She says she used to spend whole days there browsing around--she really said that--and poking under the counters and behind things for what she wanted. Just fancy! I think a nice polite clerk that comes up to you with a pleasant smile and says, 'What can I do for you, Madam?' is much nicer, don't you? "I've saved the worst of my news for the last. I hope it won't make you unhappy, for there will be some way out of it, I reckon. It's this: I hate the room-mate I've got to have. She's perfectly horrid--you wouldn't like her a bit, Uncle Cliff; and the way she shakes hands--well, it makes you feel as if you were going to have to support her until she got through with the ordeal--so limp, and lack-a-daisy. She's tall and thin, with straw-colored hair and white eyelashes and cold blue eyes, and she's from Bangor, Maine. I tried to talk with her for a minute while Aunt Lucinda and the house-mother were making arrangements about me, but all I could gather was that she was a Senior, and from the State of Maine. Why do you suppose these Easterners always say from the State of something? Seems so much easier to just say Maine.