Hope we're not boring you with all this, Kitten, but we must tell it to someone and you are closest and dearest to us. You missed out on nearly all our doings after we closed the school so call it a filling-in process. Someone should have the full story although what good it will ever do is debatable. Perhaps at some future time we can do something with it--if we get out of the present jackpot. Got to move. The state police have taken over the operation and our sheriff is relegated to the role of visiting fireman. It's lamentable that we aren't in his bailiwick. Things might work out better. These troopers are very efficient. Donald ESPs them folding a cordon around our end of the swamp. All we can do is head through its length now. Trainor is with them. Thurlow has joined them also. We get a tiny jab of pain as we pass over him. That impossible man! Naturally our pupils fell off, thinking the school completely shut down, until you visited us and were able to pass the word that discreet visits wouldn't go unrewarded. Only a few drifted back for deeper learning and expansion, as you know. One happy thing about the others who were afraid to come back is that they would still make progress, having once been awakened, though it would be infinitely slow and groping. The nucleus that sat with us on those once a week school days grew stronger very rapidly, for knowledge is cumulative and progressive, and they began to realize what they in turn had to do when they were ready. Credit must be given their strength of mind for seeing and accepting such a responsibility with the enthusiasm they showed. It was too good to last. Trainor's turn at afternoon shift came around and lasted the usual month which gave him plenty of opportunity to watch us like a hawk. He did. We were cautious but we couldn't know what he was watching for, because he didn't know either. He found out one afternoon. Visitors just don't come around and merely sit--staring at each other or the walls. We learned another lesson from that: men with as much training as he had don't always consciously think things out with their surface minds. Their reactions became instinctive and as such, untraceable by the most adept telepath. We knew he was there to spy but that's about all. The net result was a direct order from Thurlow cutting off not only all visitors, but as Trainor gleefully advised us, cancelling all accrued days off for good behavior. That's five days a month in this state and it was almost unbearable. The thorough injustice of the whole affair was beginning to gall mightily, getting under our rather thin skin in many places.