I shall be a bear until I hear from you again. Tell me all about your
pretty inconnue across the road. What is her name? Who is she? Who’s her
father? Where’s her mother? Who’s her lover? You cannot imagine how
this will occupy me. The more trifling, the better. My imprisonment has
weakened me intellectually to such a degree that I find your epistolary
gifts quite considerable. I am passing into my second childhood. In a
week or two I shall take to India rubber rings and prongs of coral.
A silver cup, with an appropriate inscription, would be a delicate
attention on your part. In the mean time, write!
IV.
EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN FLEMMING.
August 12, 1872.
The sick pasha shall be amused. Bismillah! he wills it so. If the
story-teller becomes prolix and tedious--the bow-string and the sack,
and two Nubians to drop him into the Piscataqua! But truly, Jack, I have
a hard task. There is literally nothing here--except the little girl
over the way. She is swinging in the hammock at this moment. It is to
me compensation for many of the ills of life to see her now and then put
out a small kid boot, which fits like a glove, and set herself going.
Who is she, and what is her name? Her name is Daw. Only daughter if
Mr. Richard W. Daw, ex-colonel and banker. Mother dead. One brother at
Harvard, elder brother killed at the battle of Fair Oaks, ten years
ago. Old, rich family, the Daws. This is the homestead, where father
and daughter pass eight months of the twelve; the rest of the year in
Baltimore and Washington. The New England winter too many for the old
gentleman. The daughter is called Marjorie--Marjorie Daw. Sounds odd at
first, doesn’t it? But after you say it over to yourself half a dozen
times, you like it. There’s a pleasing quaintness to it, something prim
and violet-like. Must be a nice sort of girl to be called Marjorie Daw.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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