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 Revolution about some of the great stratagems they wanted him to execute for them with his regiment, which was a very fine one.  They hope that they’re worth much more than any thousand dollars, and they are to be the price of Lovelace Peyton’s eyes.  The Idol has written about them and he hopes to get the money immediately by telegraph, and send for the doctor the first of next week.  That is, if God doesn’t let me get my telegram before theirs.  He is going to, my faith makes me believe.

And Oh!  I do want my composition to be printed so the world may know what a good man my father could be, if he would just give up his thirst for money.  It may keep other young men from following in his footsteps, instead of doing like Judge Luttrell and other Byrdsville men.