“This is April Fool’s Day, and I’ve had a great old time fooling everybody.  Sewed down the knives and forks to the breakfast-table, tied the chairs to the legs, salted the coffee, and did quite a few little every-day stunts like that.  Max got maddest when he ran onto a big lump of cayenne in his oatmeal, but Joanna gave him another dish right away and another cup of coffee.  She’s awfully soft over old Max.  The best lining I did was the way I fooled Jarve on a letter from you.  I knew he had had one from you sometime in March, so I looked in his coat-pocket while he was up in the timber lot with a sweater on.  I found it—­pretty much used up with being carried around—­suppose he forgot to take it out.  Got a fresh thin envelope, put the old one inside, traced the address through, pasted on a postmark from your last one to me, and put three heavy sheets inside to make it fat—­a lot fatter than the one I got out of his pocket.  Stuck on old stamps—­two of ’em—­overweight, you know.

“When he came in to luncheon he found the letter with his other mail.  I had my eye on him—­I was pretending to read the morning paper.  He read all his other letters, but he put that one in his pocket.  He got terribly jolly after that—­cracking jokes and everything.  The minute luncheon was over he went off to his room, and I cut for out-of-doors.  Didn’t let him get a sight of me for hours.  When I did come in I thought maybe he’d have got over being fussed, but—­pitchforks and hammer handles!—­if the minute I hove in sight he didn’t get after me!  He must have put on a lot of muscle chopping wood and hoeing, for I thought a cyclone had struck me.  I’m resting up now, but I feel pretty sore yet—­in spots.  That’s why I’m writing to you.  I think you’d better write him once in a while, so that getting what he thinks is a letter won’t go to his head like that.

“It’ll be the first of May in one month more, and you’ll be home!  Jolly!—­that seems good to think of.

“Heaps of love from BOB.”

On the following day came a letter from Janet Ferry.  It was a letter of several sheets, and the last two pages ran thus: 

“The boys think you ought not to know about it, and intend it for a surprise, but I am so sure that it will do you even more good to hear while you are waiting to come home, I’m going to tell you.  Alec and Bob have been rolling the lawn with a roller they were at great pains to get from the Burnside place in the city!  You should have seen them at it, encouraging each other to do the thing thoroughly.  Afterward they scattered wood ashes in all the thin places; Bob said they had been saving them all winter from the fireplace.  I didn’t know Alec could be so interested in out-door labour, but this winter seems to have given him an impetus toward following Mr. Burnside’s example—­and Don’s—­for I think Don has had a hand in waking him up.

“Speaking of Don—­I found him out in your garden yesterday, pruning your old rose-bushes—­the ones that you inherited with the garden.  He says you are particularly fond of the many-leaved pink ones that smell so much sweeter than any hot-house rose that ever grew.