to go on
with your solitary brand of education. There is a little one-horse
school in Byrdsville that they call the Byrd Academy, and I watched a
bunch of real human boys and girls go in the gate the morning I got
there. I think you will have to be one of them. I want to see a few
hayseeds sprinkled over your very polished surface."

I laughed with him. That is the good thing about Father: you can
always laugh with him, even if you are not sure what you are laughing
about. Laughing _at_ a person is just as rude as eating an apple
right in his face. Father always divides his apple. Though rich, he is
a really noble man.

But although I didn't cry when I heard Belle talking a course of
righteous action into fat Mamie Sue about me, I made up my mind that I
would have to have some sort of person to talk to, so I bought this
book. I am going to call it "Louise" and do as good a stunt of
pretending that it has got brown hair and blue eyes and a real heart
as I can. All I have written up to now has just been introducing
myself to Louise. Our real adventures and conversations will come
later.

Before I have gone to bed all this week I have been taking a peep out
of my window down over the back garden to Roxanne Byrd's cottage and
asking her in my heart to forgive me for taking her home, and asking
God to make her love the cottage as I would like to be let to love
her. To think that I have to sleep in her great-grandmother's
four-poster bed that Roxanne has always slept in! I have to pray hard
to be forgiven for it and to be able to endure the doing of it.
Good-night!

This has been a very curious and happy kind of day, Louise, and I feel
excited and queer. I have had a long talk with Roxanne Byrd over our
garden fence, and she is just as wonderful as I thought she was going
to be. A person's dream about another person is so apt to be a kind of
misfit, but Roxanne slipped into mine about her just as if it had been
made for her.

The little Byrd boy is named Lovelace Peyton for his two grandfathers,
and he looks and sounds just like he had come out of a beautiful book;
but he doesn't act accordingly. He is slim and rosy and dimply, with
yellow curls just mopped all over his head, and he has blue eyes the
color that the sky is hardly ever; but from what Roxanne says about
him I hardly see how he will live to grow up. He falls in and sits in
and down and on and breaks and eats things in the most terrible
fashion, and he has