e, I am having my two
weeks' vacation up here in this little hilly place. I get two weeks off
every summer--and actually sit down! I'm doing it now--if my writing
joggles now and then it is because I am rocking. I want to make the most
of my opportunities. This is the quietest place to sit and rock I was
ever in.

"Your letter was such a delightful surprise. Of course, I'll take you
with me. I'll do more than introduce you to my assistant Rose. No, I'll
not describe her to you. I will wait and let you see her for yourself.
Well, Dinney's mother is very sick. I could not bear to leave her. What
do you think she said to me the last thing? 'I'll wait'--just those two
words--when waiting will be so cruelly hard. I would not have come now,
but the doctor put his foot down. I suppose I was worn out.

"My dear, if I loved anyone very much I should say to her: 'Never be a
District Nurse!' It's so terribly hard on the heart-strings.

"There is another Dinney on Pleasant Street, but his name is Straps. I
don't know why, unless because of his one suspender, and then it ought
to be _Strap_. He looks like Dinney, but his 'baby' he leads by the
elbow instead of drags in a cart. The baby of Straps is very old and
blind, the shoestrings he sells on the corner are very poor ones, but
when you need shoestrings I wish you would buy those. Din--I mean
Straps--leads him back and forth and loves him. There doesn't seem any
reason in all the world why he should--or could--but he does.

"There, I must stop.

"Lovingly,

"MARY S. WINSHIP,

"District Nurse."

The letter of the District Nurse reawakened all Gloria's interest in the
street she had "discovered." She thought about it a great deal while
she and Aunt Em were driven about sightseeing. Her preoccupation was a
source of gentle worriment to Aunt Em, and would have been even more
so had that dear person suspected Gloria's designs against Un-Pleasant
Street. These designs were unbosomed in a second letter to the District
Nurse.

CHAPTER IV.

Gloria's second letter to the District Nurse ran thus:

"_Dear Miss Winship_: I keep thinking of those dreadful houses. Every
time I look in a daily paper I expect to read that one of them has
tumbled down, and I'm afraid it will be Dinney's house, where that poor,
sick woman is--or Straps' house! They _ought_ to tumble down, every one
of them, but not till they are emptied of their poor loads of humanity.
If they are half as bad in