ers of a long,
soft sleep ... who have laid them thankfully down to rest and left no
call!

I hear the _klip-klup_ of Lizzie, the postman's horse, so I can't
tell you about the Gillespies until next letter.

Dear M.D., I'm growing so nice you wouldn't know me for the frenzied
vaude-villain of a fortnight past. Some of the old cells in my brains
are coming to life again. _Thanks_, Michael Daragh! Do you know what
M.D. stands for?--Do-er of Miracles. Isn't it pretty much of a
miracle to make me turn my back on five orders and bring my soul up
here to renovate it?

J. V.

_Tuesday._

Michael Daragh, I'm up in my cunning little room with its heaving
ceiling and its braided mats and patchwork quilt, and I can look down
on the corner of the graveyard and see Dan'l and his dog waiting for
Uncle Robert. He is not a real postman but he drives down for his own
mail every day and "stops by" with the Gillespies'. (Not that they
ever have any!) He's the old man who got down on his rusty black
stomach to peek into the culvert and call "Come, pup, come, _dear_!"
He's the sweetest old thing with Dan'l. The child lives in constant
hope of a letter, and every day Uncle Robert (he's everybody's
uncle) says, "Wall, not _to-day_, Dan'l!" And then Dan'l and the pup
trot home.

Dan'l is the most appealing child! I've always fancied the freckles
and splinters and grime and cheek type of little boy, but Dan'l gets
into your heart, some way. He makes me think of Andrea del Sarto's
young St. John in the Wilderness, for he has, in addition to the
unearthly sweetness in his eyes, a warmth of coloring at variance
with the drained fairness of these islanders. His Canadian mother
explains that,--"her that was Angerleek Larrydoo," as the neighbors
say, and that just expresses it. She was--but she isn't any more.
She's just the Deacon's "woman." (That is his own gallant phrase: "I
guess likely my woman'll cal'late she c'n do fer y'u," he said when I
asked for board.)

She has a sort of petrified prettiness, the ghost of girlhood in a
face furrowed and sagging with fretted years. Age and unhappiness
have hardened about the sweetness of long ago--like a rose imbedded
in ice at a country fair.

And the Deacon! I didn't know it gave his like, in these lax days. He
has a beautifully chise