I say, I
think just lately I have worked more than twenty-four hours a day.
Good-night!

* * * * *

I am glad that article for the weekly was finished yesterday, and
expressed, for if I hadn't finished it, I might have had to wait some
time. I must study hard now, for examinations begin next week, and I
am so far behind that it is difficult for me to even understand what
they are talking about in class, and I have been able to recite purely
by accident. It is one of the strange and unaccountable things that
happen in a person's life that hard study or the lack of it has no
real influence on the way a girl or boy recites. If I am well prepared
on a lesson, the teacher always asks me something that had slipped my
most diligent hunt, and if I don't know a thing about the lesson she
asks me a question about something I do know about. Such is school
life!

And it is a fortunate thing for me that next week is examination, for
everybody is too worried and busy to notice me and my affairs, and
they don't talk Scouts or parties or anything that I might be
embarrassed about on account of my position. Quadratics are
embarrassing to everybody. I have to study. Good-night.

* * * * *

I did the Idol a dreadful injustice when I felt that he had gone to
work on another of his inventions and had not made a plan for Lovelace
Peyton's eyes. I didn't write down that I had felt hard toward him,
for that would have seemed disloyal, but I did. He wrote right up to
the doctor in Cincinnati and asked him to come on the next train and
the heartless man telegraphed that it would cost a thousand dollars
for him to come and it would have to be guaranteed. No wonder the Idol
was white and still for a whole day. Now he has thought up a plan and
it is a sacrifice, but he and Roxanne are going to do it, if I can't
get the thousand by telegram, as I asked Cousin Gilmore to send it by
Monday morning--which they don't know about yet. I hate to write the
sacrifice down--it seems a desecration! They are going to sell one of
the foundation stones of the Byrd family pride for this vulgar money
they need for the doctor from Cincinnati. I can't bear to think about
it, though I have never seen the ancestral stone, and it is only a few
musty papers, kept in the vault at the Byrdsville County Bank. They
are letters from George Washington and other generals to one of the
Byrd ancestors, written during the Revo