I am little enough still to love puppies and big enough to love Washington Irving. You might think these don't mix well, but they do. On rainy mornings I like to take a puppy under one arm and _The Alhambra_ under the other, with eight or ten apples in my lap, and climb up in the loft to enjoy the greatest pleasure of my life. I sling _The Alhambra_ up on the hay first, then ease the puppy up and take the hem of my skirt between my teeth so the apples won't spill out while I go up after them. But I never even look at hay when there's a pile of cottonseed to wallow in. As to my ways, I'm sorry to say that I'm what mother calls a "peculiar child." Mammy says I'm "the curiousest mixtry she ever seen." That's because I ask "Why?" very often and then lots of times don't exactly believe that things are that way when they're told to me. One day at Sunday-school, when I was about four, the teacher was telling about Jonah. Mother often told me tales, some that I called "make-believe," and others that I called "_so_ tales." When the teacher got through I spoke up and asked her if that was a "so tale." She said yes, it was, but I horrified every other child in the class by speaking up again and saying, "Well, me don't believe it!" Old as I am now, I don't see how Jonah's constitution could have stood it, but I've got sense enough to believe many a thing that I can't see nor smell nor feel. An old man out in the mountains that had never been anywhere might say he didn't believe in electricity, but that wouldn't keep your electric light bill from being more than you thought it ought to be at the end of the month. Speaking of bills reminds me of father. Father is not a rich man, but his folks used to be before the war. That's the way with so many people around here, they have more ancestry than anything else. Still, we have perfectly lovely smelling old leather books in our library, and when cotton goes high we go up to the city and take a suite of rooms with a bath. I am telling you all this, my grandchildren, to let you know that you have blue blood in your veins, but you mustn't let yours get too blue. Father says it takes a dash of red blood mixed with blue, like turpentine with paint, to make it go. Still, I hope the old place will be just as beautiful when my grandchildren get old enough to appreciate it as it is now, and not be sold and turned into a sanitarium, or a girls' school. The walls of the house are a soft grayish white, like a dear old grandmother's hair; and the mycravella roses in the far corner of the yard put _such_ notions into your head! There are rows of cedar trees down the walk, planted before Andrew Jackson's time; and at night there are the stars. I love stars, especially Venus; but there are a lot of others that I don't know the names of.