, not with all the sympathy I can muster.

We are doing our best to run this institution with as few discommoding
rules as possible, but in regard to those play boxes there is one point
on which I shall have to be firm. The children may not keep in them mice
or toads or angleworms.

I can't tell you how pleased I am that Betsy's salary is to be raised,
and that we are to keep her permanently. But the Hon. Cy Wykoff
deprecates the step. He has been making inquiries, and he finds that her
people are perfectly able to take care of her without any salary.

"You don't furnish legal advice for nothing," say I to him. "Why should
she furnish her trained services for nothing?"

"This is charitable work."

"Then work which is undertaken for your own good should be paid, but
work which is undertaken for the public good should not be paid?"

"Fiddlesticks!" says he. "She's a woman, and her family ought to support
her."

This opened up vistas of argument which I did not care to enter with the
Hon. Cy, so I asked him whether he thought it would be nicer to have
a real lawn or hay on the slope that leads to the gate. He likes to
be consulted, and I pamper him as much as possible in all unessential
details. You see, I am following Sandy's canny advice: "Trustees are
like fiddle-strings; they maunna be screwed ower tight. Humor the mon,
but gang your ain gait." Oh, the tact that this asylum is teaching me! I
should make a wonderful politician's wife.

Thursday night.

You will be interested to hear that I have temporarily placed out Punch
with two charming spinsters who have long been tottering on the brink
of a child. They finally came last week, and said they would like to try
one for a month to see what the sensation felt like.

They wanted, of course, a pretty ornament, dressed in pink and white and
descended from the Mayflower. I told them that any one could bring up
a daughter of the Mayflower to be an ornament to society, but the real
feat was to bring up a son of an Italian organ-grinder and an Irish
washerwoman. And I offered Punch. That Neapolitan heredity of his,
artistically speaking, may turn out a glorious mixture, if the right
environment comes along to choke out all the weeds.

I put it up to them as a sporting proposition, and they were game. They
have agreed to take him for one month and concentrate upon his remaking
all their years of conserved force, to the end that he may be fit for
adoption in some