“_My dear Miss Gloria Rose_: Perhaps you didn't know District Nurses could be prompt in answering letters! But, you see, I am having my two weeks' vacation up here in this little hilly place. I get two weeks off every summer--and actually sit down! I'm doing it now--if my writing joggles now and then it is because I am rocking. I want to make the most of my opportunities. This is the quietest place to sit and rock I was ever in. “Your letter was such a delightful surprise. Of course, I'll take you with me. I'll do more than introduce you to my assistant Rose. No, I'll not describe her to you. I will wait and let you see her for yourself. Well, Dinney's mother is very sick. I could not bear to leave her. What do you think she said to me the last thing? 'I'll wait'--just those two words--when waiting will be so cruelly hard. I would not have come now, but the doctor put his foot down. I suppose I was worn out. “My dear, if I loved anyone very much I should say to her: 'Never be a District Nurse!' It's so terribly hard on the heart-strings. “There is another Dinney on Pleasant Street, but his name is Straps. I don't know why, unless because of his one suspender, and then it ought to be _Strap_. He looks like Dinney, but his 'baby' he leads by the elbow instead of drags in a cart. The baby of Straps is very old and blind, the shoestrings he sells on the corner are very poor ones, but when you need shoestrings I wish you would buy those. Din--I mean Straps--leads him back and forth and loves him. There doesn't seem any reason in all the world why he should--or could--but he does. “There, I must stop. “Lovingly, “MARY S. WINSHIP, “District Nurse.” The letter of the District Nurse reawakened all Gloria's interest in the street she had “discovered.” She thought about it a great deal while she and Aunt Em were driven about sightseeing. Her preoccupation was a source of gentle worriment to Aunt Em, and would have been even more so had that dear person suspected Gloria's designs against Un-Pleasant Street. These designs were unbosomed in a second letter to the District Nurse. CHAPTER IV. Gloria's second letter to the District Nurse ran thus: “_Dear Miss Winship_: I keep thinking of those dreadful houses. Every time I look in a daily paper I expect to read that one of them has tumbled down, and I'm afraid it will be Dinney's house, where that poor, sick woman is--or Straps' house! They _ought_ to tumble down, every one of them, but not till they are emptied of their poor loads of humanity. If they are half as bad inside as they are outside! I keep and _keep_ thinking of them. Think of a girl named Rose being in a house like that, and another girl with Rose for her middle name in a beautiful, great hotel here, or Uncle Em's lovely house at home--both of them Roses. It isn't fair!