We all like the Methodist minister.  I don’t think he knows many dead languages.  He don’t have much time to study, being so busy helping people; but he knows how to talk to us children, and he always makes me wish I wasn’t so bad.  He always does, and the Mary part of me just rises right up on his Sunday, and Martha is ashamed of herself.  He believes in getting better by the love way.  So do I.

Miss Katherine is going away next week to stay two months.  Going to her army brother’s first, and then to the California brother, who’s North somewhere.  And from the time she told me I’ve felt like Robinson Crusoe’s daughter would have felt, if he’d had one, and gone off and left her on that desert island.

I don’t know what we’re going to do when she goes away.  I could shed gallons of tears, only I don’t like tears, and then, too, she might see me.  I want her to think I’m glad she’s going, for she needs a change.  But, oh, the difference her going will make!

I will be nothing but Martha.  I know it.  Nothing but Martha until she comes back.  The Mary part of me is so sick at the thought she hasn’t any backbone, and Martha is showing signs already.

And that shows I’m just nothing, for Miss Katherine has taught us, without exactly telling, how we can’t do what we ought by wanting.  We’ve got to work.  In plain words, its watch and pray, and with me it’s the watching that’s most important.  If I’m not on the lookout, and don’t nab Martha right away, praying don’t have any effect.  I’m a natural pray-er, but on watching I’m poor.

I couldn’t make any one understand what Miss Katherine has done for us since she’s been here.  Some words don’t tell things.  The nursing when we’re sick is only a part, and though she’s fixed up one of the rooms just like a hospital-room, with everything so white and clean and sweet in it that it’s real joy to be sick, we’re not sick often.

It’s the keeping us well that’s kept her so busy.  She’s explained so many things to us we didn’t know before, she’s almost made me like my body.  I didn’t use to.  Not a bit.

It’s such a nuisance, and needs so much attention to keep it going right.  So often it was freezing cold, or blazing hot, or hungry, and had to be dressed in such ugly clothes that I was ashamed of it.  And if ever I could have hung it up in the closet or put it away in a bureau-drawer, I would have done it while I went out and had a good time.  But I couldn’t do it.  I had to take it everywhere I went, and until Miss Katherine came I had mighty little use for it.

But since she’s been here the girls are much cleaner, and we don’t mind so much not having the things to eat that we like.  That is, not quite so much.  But almost.  When you’re downright hungry for the taste of things, it don’t satisfy to say to yourself “You don’t really need it.  Be quiet.”  And being made of flesh and blood, most of us would rather eat the things we want to than the things we ought to.