“Maybe it’s mean in me to tell you but I want you to know just how They carry on, hoping you’ll pick up your traps and come home. No I don’t neither for I want you to stay and have a good time which I’m sure you don’t have here. I wish most you was my Mother though I guess girls of 25 don’t often have great strappin Boys like me, do they? I asked Dr. West and he looked so queer when he said, ‘It is possible but not common.’ Why not, I wonder? Now, Auntie, I don’t want mother to die, because she’s Mother, but if she should, _you’ll_ have father, won’t you? That’s a nice Auntie, and that makes me think. Last night mother had the headache and Dr. West was here. It was after the Rumpus in the nursery and I was sitting at the head of the stairs wishing you was come home when I heard ’em talking about you and what do you think mother told Doctor? A lot of stuff about you and that nasty Reed who was here last summer. She talked as if you liked him,—said he would be at Mrs. Randall’s and she rather expected it would be settled then. _I was so mad_, I bumped right up and down on the stairs and said Darn, Darn, as fast as I could. Now, Auntie, I didn’t mean to lie, but I have. I’ve told a whopper and you can bite my head off if you like. Dr’s voice sounded just as if he didn’t want you to like that Reed and I diddent think it right to let it go. So this morning I went over to the office and found Dr. West looking pale as if he diddent sleep good. “‘Doctor,’ says I, ‘do I look like a chap that will lie?’ “‘Why, no,’ says he, ‘I never thought you did.’ “‘But I will,’ ses I, ‘and I am come to do that very thing, come to tell you something Aunt Dora made me promise never to tell.’ “‘John, you mussent, I can’t hear you,’ he began, but I yelled up, ‘you shall; I will tell; it’s about Dora and that Reed. She don’t like him.’ Somehow he stopped hushin’ me then and pretended to fix his books while I said how last summer I overheard this Reed ask you to be his wife, and you told him no; you did not love him well enough, and never could, and how you meant it too. There diddent neither of you know I was out in the balcony, I said, until he was gone, and I _sneazed_ when you talked to me and made me promise never to tell what I’d heard to father, nor mother, nor nobody. I never did tell them, but I’ve told the doctor, and I ain’t sorry, it made him look so glad. He took me, and Tish, and Ben, and Burt, all out riding this afternoon and talked to them real nice, telling them they must be good while you was gone. Tish and Jim are pretty good, but Ben has broken the spy-glass and the umberill, and Burt has set down on the kittens, and oh I must tell you; he took a big iron spoon which he called a _sovel_ and dug up every single gladiola in the garden! Ain’t they terrible Boys?