"Have you got me off prep?" she asked earnestly, after she had kissed us and found her shoes and stockings. And having explained to her that we were going to take her out to tea for a pre-birthday treat--she was going to be sixteen next week--we inquired about the bandage. It was the result, we discovered, of an illegal (and unconfirmed) raid upon a neighbouring dormitory, during which, by a kind of Homeric retribution, a stray tin-tack had wounded her unprotected foot. "But it's about well now, I should think," she said, undoing the bandage, and turning up a salmon-pink sole for our inspection. And we were obliged to confess that it was. She rolled up the bandage into a little ball, and threw it down the beach. "I wish we could _always_ go barefoot," she sighed. And for the moment I felt inclined to agree with her. For the happy foot, as T. E. Brown has said, swings rather from the heart than from the hip. And there are few prettier things in nature than the restless, romping legs of the average healthy little maiden. They are her life's joy made visible; so that it really seems a shame, if a necessary one, to imprison them in even the airiest of stockings and the most hygienic of leather shoes. Blue gingham petticoats, White blown aprons, Five pairs of plump legs Twinkling down the hill, Black imprisoned plump legs, Fretful for the stream bed, Tired of shoes and stockings, Dancing like a rill, Dancing down the hillside, So come the children, Like a rill in sunshine, So dance they, Seek the solemn waters, Marching to the ocean, Set the solemn waters Laughing at their play. So into my heart come, Silver it with laughter, Lest among the shadows Lost should be its way, So into my heart come Rosamund and Daphne, Marian and Rosemary, And little baby May. Claire and her companions had been paddling in the big ocean itself; and being comparatively dignified did not of course wear aprons. Moreover, as I had the strongest reasons for believing, they were at this moment quite innocent of petticoats. But the little poem comes back to me as I write. "And next week," she proceeded ruefully, "I shall have to go into blobs and half-masters." We stared at her rather blankly. "All the girls do, you know," she added, "when they turn sixteen." "But blobs----" I began. "And half-masters?" puzzled Esther. "When your hair's neither up nor down," Claire explained, "with a big fat bow on it. And when you have to wear skirts a foot below your knees." She rolled over, and struck her toes into the sand. "It's to show," she finished pathetically, "that you're too grown up to be spanked and not old enough to have visiting cards." Which seems to suggest that even sixteen may have its tragedies, though its capacity for ices remains happily unimpaired. Or would you call them growing pains? And are all pains growing pains? Ever yrs., P. H. XX