Daddy-Long-Legs
as a Trustee of the John Grier Home. I kissed one sweet, sticky
little boy--but I don’t think I patted any of them on the head!
And two days after Christmas, they gave a dance at their own house
for ME.
It was the first really true ball I ever attended--college doesn’t
count where we dance with girls. I had a new white evening gown
(your Christmas present--many thanks) and long white gloves and
white satin slippers. The only drawback to my perfect, utter,
absolute happiness was the fact that Mrs. Lippett couldn’t see me
leading the cotillion with Jimmie McBride. Tell her about it,
please, the next time you visit the J. G. H.
Yours ever,
JUDY ABBOTT.
P. S. Would you be terribly displeased, Daddy, if I didn’t turn out
to be a Great Author after all, but just a Plain Girl?
6.30, Saturday.
_Dear Daddy_,
We started to walk to town to-day, but mercy! how it poured. I like
winter to be winter with snow instead of rain.
Julia’s desirable uncle called again this afternoon--and brought a
five-pound box of chocolates. There are advantages you see about
rooming with Julia.
Our innocent prattle appeared to amuse him and he waited over a
train in order to take tea in the study. And an awful lot of trouble
we had getting permission. It’s hard enough entertaining fathers
and grandfathers, but uncles are a step worse; and as for brothers
and cousins, they are next to impossible. Julia had to swear that he
was her uncle before a notary public and then have the county
clerk’s certificate attached. (Don’t I know a lot of law?) And even
then I doubt if we could have had our tea if the Dean had chanced to
see how youngish and good-looking Uncle Jervis is.
Anyway, we had it, with brown bread Swiss cheese sandwiches. He
helped make them and then ate four. I told him that I had spent last
summer at Lock Willow, and we had a beautiful gossipy time about the
Semples, and the horses and cows and chickens. All the horses that
he used to know are dead, except Grover, who was a baby colt at the
time of his last visit--and poor Grove now is so old he can just
limp about the pasture.
He asked if they still kept doughnuts in a yellow crock with a blue
plate over it on the bottom shelf of the pantry--and they do! He
wanted to know if there was still a woodchuck’s hole under the pile
of rocks in the night pasture--and there is! Amasai caught a big,
fat, gray one there this summer, the twenty-fifth great-grandson of
the one Master Jervie caught when he was a little boy.
I called him “Master Jervie” to his face, but he didn’t appear to
be insulted. Julia says that she has never seen him so amiable;
he’s usually pretty unapproachable. But Julia hasn’t a bit of
tact; and men, I find, require a great deal. They purr if you rub
them the right way and spit if you don’t. (That isn’t a very
elegant metaphor. I mean it figuratively.)
We’re reading Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal. Isn’t it amazing?
Listen to this: “Last night I was seized by a fit of despair that
found utterance in moans, and that finally drove me to throw the
dining-room clock into the sea.”
It makes me almost hope I’m not a genius; they must be very wearing
to have about--and awfully destructive to the furniture.
Mercy! how it keeps pouring. We shall have to swim to chapel
to-night.
Yours ever,
JUDY.
Jan. 20th.
_Dear Daddy-Long-Legs_,
Did you ever have a sweet baby girl who was stolen from the cradle
in infancy?
Maybe I am she! If we were in a novel, that would be the dénouement,
wouldn’t it?
It’s really awfully queer not to know what one is--sort of exciting
and romantic. There are such a lot of possibilities. Maybe I’m not
American; lots of people aren’t. I may be straight descended from
the ancient Romans, or I may be a Viking’s daughter, or I may be the
child of a Russian exile and belong by rights in a Siberian prison,
or maybe I’m a Gipsy--I think perhaps I am. I have a very
_wandering_ spirit, though I haven’t as yet had much chance to
develop it.
Do you know about that one scandalous blot in my career--the time I
ran away from the asylum because they punished me for stealing
cookies? It’s down in the books free for any Trustee to read. But
really, Daddy, what could you expect? When you put a hungry little
nine-year girl in the pantry scouring knives, with the cookie jar at
her elbow, and go off and leave her alone; and then suddenly pop in
again, wouldn’t you expect to find her a bit crumby? And then when
you jerk her by the elbow and box her ears, and make her leave the
table when the pudding comes, and tell all the other children that
it’s because she’s a thief, wouldn’t you expect her to run away?
I only ran four miles. They caught me and brought me back; and every
day for a week I was tied, like a naughty puppy, to a stake in the
back yard while the other children were out at recess.
Oh, dear! There’s the chapel bell, and after chapel I have a
committee meeting. I’m sorry because I meant to write you a _very_
entertaining letter this time.
_Auf wiedersehen_
_Cher_ Daddy
_Pax tibi!_
JUDY.
P. S. There’s one thing I’m perfectly sure of. I’m _not_ a
Chinaman.
February 4th.
_Dear Daddy-Long-Legs_,
Jimmie McBride has sent me a Princeton banner as big as one end of
the room; I am very grateful to him for remembering me, but I don’t
know what on earth to do with it. Sallie and Julia won’t let me hang
it up; our room this year is furnished in red, and you can imagine
what an effect we’d have if I added orange and black. But it’s
such nice, warm, thick felt, I hate to waste it. Would it be very
improper to have it made into a bath robe? My old one shrank when it
was washed.
I’ve entirely omitted of late telling you what I am learning,
but though you might not imagine it from my letters, my time is
exclusively occupied with study. It’s a very bewildering matter to
get educated in five branches at once.
“The test of true scholarship,” says Chemistry Professor, “is a
painstaking passion for detail.”
“Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail,” says History
Professor. “Stand far enough away to get a perspective on the
whole.”
You can see with what nicety we have to trim our sails between
chemistry and history. I like the historical method best. If I say
that William the Conqueror came over in 1492, and Columbus
discovered America in 1100 or 1066 or whenever it was, that’s a
mere detail that the Professor overlooks. It gives a feeling of
security and restfulness to the history recitation, that is entirely
lacking in chemistry.
Sixth-hour bell--I must go to the laboratory and look into a little
matter of acids and salts and alkalis. I’ve burned a hole as big as
a plate in the front of my chemistry apron, with hydrochloric acid.
If the theory worked, I ought to be able to neutralize that hole
with good strong ammonia, oughtn’t I?
Examinations next week, but who’s afraid?
Yours ever,
JUDY.
March 5th.
_Dear Daddy-Long-Legs_,
There is a March wind blowing, and the sky is filled with heavy,
black moving clouds. The crows in the pine trees are making such a
clamor! It’s an intoxicating, exhilarating, _calling_ noise. You
want to close your books and be off over the hills to race with the
wind.
We had a paper chase last Saturday over five miles of squashy ’cross
country. The fox (composed of three girls and a bushel or so of
confetti) started half an hour before the twenty-seven hunters.
I was one of the twenty-seven; eight dropped by the wayside; we
ended nineteen. The trail led over a hill, through a cornfield, and
into a swamp where we had to leap lightly from hummock to hummock.
Of course half of us went in ankle deep. We kept losing the trail,
and wasted twenty-five minutes over that swamp. Then up a hill
through some woods and in at a barn window! The barn doors were all
locked and the window was up high and pretty small. I don’t call
that fair, do you?
But we didn’t go through; we circumnavigated the barn and picked up
the trail where it issued by way of a low shed roof onto the top of
a fence. The fox thought he had us there, but we fooled him. Then
straight away over two miles of rolling meadow, and awfully hard to
follow, for the confetti was getting sparse. The rule is that it
must be at the most six feet apart, but they were the longest six
feet I ever saw. Finally, after two hours of steady trotting, we
tracked Monsieur Fox into the kitchen of Crystal Spring (that’s a
farm where the girls go in bob sleighs and hay wagons for chicken
and waffle suppers) and we found the three foxes placidly eating
milk and honey and biscuits. They hadn’t thought we would get that
far; they were expecting us to stick in the barn window.
Both sides insist that they won. I think we did, don’t you? Because
we caught them before they got back to the campus. Anyway, all
nineteen of us settled like locusts over the furniture and clamored
for honey. There wasn’t enough to go round, but Mrs. Crystal Spring
(that’s our pet name for her; she’s by rights a Johnson) brought
up a jar of strawberry jam and a can of maple syrup--just made last
week--and three loaves of brown bread.
We didn’t get back to college till half-past six--half an hour late
for dinner--and we went straight in without dressing, and with
perfectly unimpaired appetites! Then we all cut evening chapel,
the state of our boots being enough of an excuse.
I never told you about examinations. I passed everything with the
utmost ease--I know the secret now, and am never going to flunk
again. I shan’t be able to graduate with honors though, because of
that beastly Latin prose and geometry Freshman year. But I don’t
care. Wot’s the hodds so long as you’re ’appy? (That’s a
quotation. I’ve been reading the English classics.)
Speaking of classics, have you ever read “Hamlet”? If you haven’t,
do it right off. It’s _perfectly corking_. I’ve been hearing about
Shakespeare all my life, but I had no idea he really wrote so well;
I always suspected him of going largely on his reputation.
I have a beautiful play that I invented a long time ago when I first
learned to read. I put myself to sleep every night by pretending
I’m the person (the most important person) in the book I’m reading
at the moment.
At present I’m Ophelia--and such a sensible Ophelia! I keep Hamlet
amused all the time, and pet him and scold him and make him wrap up
his throat when he has a cold. I’ve entirely cured him of being
melancholy. The King and Queen are both dead--an accident at sea; no
funeral necessary--so Hamlet and I are ruling in Denmark without any
bother. We have the kingdom working beautifully. He takes care of
the governing, and I look after the charities. I have just founded
some first-class orphan asylums. If you or any of the other Trustees
would like to visit them, I shall be pleased to show you through.
I think you might find a great many helpful suggestions.
I remain, sir,
Yours most graciously,
OPHELIA,
Queen of Denmark.
March 24th
maybe the 25th.
_Dear Daddy-Long-Legs_,
I don’t believe I can be going to Heaven--I am getting such a lot of
good things here; it wouldn’t be fair to get them hereafter, too.
Listen to what has happened.
Jerusha Abbott has won the short-story contest (a twenty-five dollar
prize) that the _Monthly_ holds every year. And she a Sophomore!
The contestants are mostly Seniors. When I saw my name posted,
I couldn’t quite believe it was true. Maybe I am going to be an
author after all. I wish Mrs. Lippett hadn’t given me such a silly
name--it sounds like an author-ess, doesn’t it?