I resolved to have it out with Jean. There was no sense in letting things go on like this. Jean had happiness within her grasp, for the taking, but she persisted in writing moon-struck doggerel to a man who apparently cared no more for her than for the post that marked the corner of his section. Spoof's continued and deliberate neglect--I called it neglect now----admitted no other explanation. I spent a wakeful night thinking about this, and toward morning I got up and retrieved the crumpled bit of paper which I had thrown into a corner of the kitchen. I spread it out and read the lines again. A night of reflexion had worn the edge from my indignation, and I admitted that, from an artistic point of view, the verses were perhaps not so hopeless as I had thought them. Indeed, they suggested a certain germ of poetic ability. A little devil of conscience began an insurrection in my sense of fair play, demanding to know if I could write as well myself. But I am no poet. I took a pencil and put down the word Jean, and then set about hunting for rhymes for it, but I could think of only two--"lean" and "bean." Neither of these seemed to lend itself to poetic treatment. Suddenly a whiff of memory rushing in from somewhere sent me scuttling among old school books at the bottom of my trunk. It was a whim of mine to keep my old school books, if only that in after years I might read and appreciate the little gems of literature which, with the assistance of a phlegmatic teacher, I cordially hated when a child. Here it was--an old Ontario Reader with a sensational story about an Indian woman who killed a bear with a butcher knife, or some such weapon. My sympathy, I remember, had always been with the bear, doubtless because of the picture which was made to represent the Indian woman. I had read this story again and again, when all other passages in the book had failed to interest me, and some little long-forgotten cell of memory said I would find a fragment of paper tucked between these pages. Sure enough, there it was! I drew it out eagerly, but tenderly and almost reverently, and held it under the lamp. How that strange, childish scrawl seemed to run all over my heart and pucker it into little gasping pockets! I could feel a thumping between my lungs and the hard beating of my pulse went throbbing through the paper in my fingers. When I am old And very tall I hope my name Will be Mrs. Hall.