2

    Why was such a trip e’er started
    On a pathway all uncharted? 
    Why from loved ones was I parted? 
    Who will answer?  Who?

    3

    None will answer.  So I’ll see
    What there is on this journey (journee)
    That will bring good-luck to me—­
    I’ll look out and see!

I hope Minnie isn’t going to be sick long.  She is the first girl to be really ill since Miss Katherine came.  It makes you feel so queer in the throat to know somebody is truly sick.

A lot of the girls have been sick a little with colds and small and unserious diseases in the past year.  But Miss Katherine says it’s her business to keep us well, not just get us well after we’re sick, and she’s certainly done it.  We’ve been weller than we ever were in our lives, and no medicine taken.  Just plain common-sense regulations.

I wonder what’s the matter with Minnie?  The doctor hasn’t said, but Miss Katherine is uneasy, and she won’t let anybody come in the room.  She hasn’t been out herself since yesterday.

* * * * *

My, but we’ve had a time lately!

We’ve been fumigated and sterilized and fertilized so much that we are better prepared for the happy-land than we ever were before.  But the danger of anybody going to it right away is over.

Minnie Peters has had scarlet fever, and the commotion made her real famous.

Miss Katherine knew it from the first, but Dr. Rudd wouldn’t believe it until he had to, and Yorkburg got so excited it hasn’t talked of anything else for weeks.

Minnie was awful ill.  Two days and two nights they didn’t think she would live, and for three weeks Miss Katherine didn’t leave the room.  If it hadn’t been for her Minnie would be dead.

Miss Katherine’s room has been closed since they first found out it was really scarlet fever Minnie had, and I have been in No. 4 again.  She is going away to spend a week with Miss Webb.  Going to-morrow.

I am so glad she is going.  All of us are glad, for she has had to do something which shows whether you are a Christ-kind Christian or the usual kind, and she is tired out.  She won’t admit it, though, and laughs and kisses her hand over the banister, which is all the closer we have seen her yet.

Miss Bray was scared to death.  She didn’t offer to share the nursing, but she made excuses a-plenty for not doing it.  Miss Bray is a church Christian.  You couldn’t make her miss going to church.  She thinks she’d have bad luck if she did.

VIII

MARY CARY’S BUSINESS

This is a busy time of the year, and things are moving.  I’m in business.  The Apple and Entertainment business.

The reason I went in business was to make money, and the money was to buy Christmas presents with.

I didn’t have a cent.  Not one.  Christmas was coming.  Money wasn’t.  And what’s the use of Christmas if you can’t give something to somebody?