mothery. I don't know what made me cry, but I
couldn't help it. I couldn't.

She doesn't know me except from what Miss Katherine writes, and I
wonder why she wrote that note. But everybody is good to me--that is,
nearly everybody.

It certainly makes a difference in your backbone when people are kind
and when they are not. I don't believe unkindness and misfortune and
suffering will ever make me good. If anybody is mean to me, I'm
stifferer than a lamp-post, and you couldn't make me cry. But when any
one is good to me, I haven't a bit of firmness, and am no better than a
caterpillar.

I got thirty-one presents this year. Thirty-one! I didn't know I had so
many friends in Yorkburg, and my heart was so bursting with surprise and
gratitude it just ached. Ached happy.

We are not often allowed to make regular visits, but I have lots of
little talks informal on errands, or messages, or passing; and as I know
almost everybody by sight, I have a right large speaking acquaintance.
With some people, Miss Katherine says, that's the safest kind to have.

You see, Yorkburg is a very small place. Just three long streets and
some short ones going across. Scratching up everything, it hasn't got
three thousand people in it. A lot of them are colored.

But it's very old and historic. Awful old; so is everything in it. As
for its blue blood, Mrs. Hunt says there's more in Yorkburg than any
place of its size in America.

Most of the strangers who come here, though, seem to prefer to pass on
rather than stop, and Miss Webb thinks it's on account of the blood. A
little red mixed in might wake Yorkburg up, she says, and that's what it
needs--to know the war is over and the change has come to stay.

But I love Yorkburg, and most of the people are dear. Some queer. Old
Mrs. Peet is. Her husband has been dead forty years, but she still keeps
his hat on the rack for protection, and whenever any one goes to see her
after dark she always calls him, as if he were upstairs.

She lives by herself and is over seventy, and she's pretended so long
that he's living that they say she really believes he is. She almost
makes you believe it, too.

Miss Bray sent me there one night. She wanted some cherry-bounce for
Eliza Green, who had an awful pain, and after I'd knocked, I'd have run
if I'd dared.

In the hall I could hear Mrs. Peet pounding on the floor with her stick.
Then her little piping voice:

"Mr. Peet, Mr. Peet, you'd better come d