"I think of you every day of my life. I have put your photo on my dressing-table, and I kiss it good-night and good-morning as if it were really you. I am trying very hard to be happy, but my two troubles are porridge and scales. Porridge is something like the food Tasso used to mix up for the ducks, only you eat it hot. Blair says it will make me grow strong, and I must take what is given me and not find fault, so I gulp it down, though it nearly chokes me. Scales are detestable. Miss Masterman puts pennies on the backs of my hands, but I cannot help jerking my arm when I turn my thumb under, so they always fall on to the floor, and then she is cross. "I like drawing the best of all my lessons. I have bought a new paint-box with the money you sent me, and I will try and make pictures for you of everything I see. There are no orange-trees or coffee-plantations here. We go walks down long streets with tall houses on both sides, or sometimes into the Park, which I like better, though it is not so nice as the garden at San Carlos, for you may not pick the flowers, and there are sparrows instead of humming-birds. I hope Juanita does not forget to feed the terrapin and the green lizard. Give my love to her, and to Tasso and Pedro and everybody. Aunt Agatha is writing to you herself, and she will put this letter inside hers. "From your loving little daughter, "PHILIPPA SEATON." If I found my life in London rather hard to bear at times, I am afraid my attempts to relieve the monotony of my existence were not always a success at head-quarters. I had a lively imagination, and my inventive faculty was continually leading me into planning games which my cousins thought only too delightful, but which were set down as either mess or mischief by those in authority. When Aunt Agatha found us tobogganing down the back staircase in a clothes-basket, she knew at once the instigator of the sport, and she easily guessed who had taken the chairs from the best bedroom to form a menagerie in the nursery. It was I who conceived the brilliant idea of making a sea-side resort for the dolls with the aid of the tea-tray full of water and the sand out of the canary's cage, a most interesting and fascinating pastime for us, but looked at in a very different light by Blair, when she returned to find the younger children with sopping pinafores, and my miniature ocean slowly wending its way in trickles over the nursery floor. "You get into mischief the moment my back is turned. I'm sure the children never thought of doing such things before you came!" she said severely. [Illustration: MAKING A SEA-SIDE RESORT FOR THE DOLLS]