the water all evening, each sitting in our end of
the boat with a lot of pillows at our back and looking at the moon. You
know I never seemed to have known the moon before, he is a new friend
that I have made at Lake Rest, and life will never be quite the same now
I have known him. He makes me dream and I plan such a happy future for
you and me and Billy, and when I look at him there is nothing but rose
leaves in life. But--well--it is a new moon now, I wonder what the old
moon will say.

Lovingly,
_Nan_.

VIII

_Dear Kate_:

It is raining and I am staying in the room cause I bit my tongue last
night and I can't talk. I am sore. Sometimes I think I will never do a
good trick for a person as long as I live, and then, when the time comes
I am always Mr. Easymark. Last night I was coming along home after work
about two o'clock, and it was cold and rainy and a miserably bum night.
At the corner of Sixth Avenue I saw a fellow all sort of hunched up,
walking along as if he had a jag. As I went by him I saw it was Fred
Dennis, and he sure looked all in. He was shaking as if he had chills
and fever, and I stopped and asked him what was the matter. He said he
just come out of the hospital where he had typhoid. Between you and me,
I think he had been in the jag ward at Bellevue, but that was none of
my business, and he sure needed help. He said he was stone broke, that
he didn't have the price for a ten-cent lodging house, and he give me a
touch. First I thought I would cough, then I looked in his shifty eyes,
and I knew he would go straight to Kelly's and get a drink and take a
chance of sleeping on the floor, so I said to him, "You come up to my
room, and I will make you some hot cocoa, and you go to bed in a _bed_.
That is what you need, or you will be costing the City a funeral." I
sneaked him up to the room and had him put on that old Japanese wadded
wrapper of mine and get in bed, and I made him some hot cocoa. His teeth
chattered like they was playing a tune, but I piled all my bed clothes
on him and my winter coat and most of my clothes and when he got warm, I
went in and slept with Myrtle Seaman. She has only a single bed, and I
went to turn over in the night and fell out and bit my tongue. Say, but
it is sore. It seems to fill my whole mouth, and I spend most of my
time setting in front of the looking glass to see if the swelling is
stopped.

But my tongue ain't half as sore as I was, when I went into