SANTA BARBARA, November 5.

DEAR MY FREND.

I was joy pleased to received a letter from you how are Your getting along and my Dear if your leaves a go We but now I been it is here I am very sorry for are a your go to in San Francisco if any now did you been it is that here very happy and joy I am so glad for your are to do teachers for me but I am very much thank you dear my frend.

        Good-By.  AH FOY.

        November 15,

. . .  The first compartment, cigar-box, could n’t pay back the money it borrowed from the second compartment, and so this in turn had to borrow from the third compartment.  I could have made everything straight, I think, if we had n’t bought a feather duster and a gallon of kerosene.  The first will last forever, and the second for six weeks, so it is n’t fair to call compartment number two extravagant.  At the end of this month I shall remove some of the partitions in the cigar-box and keep the house-money in two parts, balancing accounts every fortnight. . . .

        November 24.

. . .  My bookkeeping is in a frightful snarl.  There is neither borrowing nor lending in the cigar-box now, for all the money for the month is gone at the end of the third week.  The water, it seems, was not included in the thirty dollars for the rent, and compartment three had to pay two dollars for that purpose when compartment two was still deeply in its debt.  If compartment two had only met its rightful obligations, compartment three need n’t have “failed up,” as they say in New England; but as it is, poor compartment four is entirely bankrupt, and will have to borrow of the sugar-bowl or the ginger-jar.  As these banks are not at all in the same line of business, they ought not to be drawn into the complications of the cigar-box, for they will have their own troubles by and by; but I don’t know what else to do. . . .

        December 2.

. . .  It came out better at the end of the month than I feared, for we spent very little last week, and have part of the ten pounds of sugar, kerosene, feather duster, scrubbing-brush, blanc-mange mould, tapioca, sago, and spices with which to begin the next month.  I suffered so with the debts, losses, business embarrassments, and failures of the four compartments that when I found I was only four dollars behind on the whole month’s expenses, I knocked out all the compartments, and am not going to keep things in weeks.  I made up the deficit by taking two dollars out of the reserve fund, and two dollars out of my ten-dollar gold piece that Dr. George gave me on my birthday.

I have given the ginger-jar a note of hand for two dollars from the cigar-box, and it has resumed business at the old stand.  Compartment four, cigar-box, which is perfectly innocent, as it was borrowed out of house and home by compartment three, also had to give a note to the sugar-bowl, and I made the ginger-jar give me a note for my two dollars birthday-money.