And there I sat on my front steps, being embraced in a perfume of everybody’s lilacs and peachblow and sweet syringa and affectionate interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two photographs and many letters I had kept locked up in the garret for years.  Is it any wonder I tingled when he told me that he had never come back because he couldn’t have me and that now the minute he landed in America he was going to lay his heart at my feet?  I added his honors to his prostrate heart myself and my own beat at the prospect.  All the eight years faded away and I was again back in the old garden down at Aunt Adeline’s cottage saying good-by, folded up in his arms.  That’s the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word “folded” made me remember that blue muslin dress again.  I had promised to keep it and wear it for him when he came back—­and I couldn’t forget that the blue belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is—­no, I won’t write it.  I had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes after I had read the letter and measured it.

No, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to Doctor John with such a real trouble as that!  All of a sudden I hugged the letter and the little book up close to my breast and laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.

Then before I went into the house I assembled my garden and had family prayers with my flowers.  I do that because they are all the family I’ve got, and God knows that all His budding things need encouragement, whether it is a widow or a snowball-bush.  He’ll give it to us!

And I’m praying again as I sit here and watch for the doctor’s light to go out.  I hate to go to sleep and leave it burning, for he sits up so late and he is so gaunt and thin and tired-looking most times.  That’s what the last prayer is about, almost always,—­sleep for him and no night call!

LEAF SECOND

A LOVE-LETTER, LOADED

The very worst page in this red—­red devil—­I’m glad I’ve written it at last—­of a book is the fifth.  It says: 

“Breakfast—­one slice of dry toast, one egg, fruit and a tablespoonful of baked cereal, small cup of coffee, no sugar, no cream.”  And me with two Jersey cows full of the richest cream in Hillsboro, Harpeth Valley, out in my pasture!

“Dinner, one small lean chop, slice of toast, spinach, green beans and lettuce salad.  No dessert or sweet.”  The blue-grass in my yard is full of fat little fryers and I wish I were a sheep if I have to eat lettuce and spinach for grass.  At least I’d have more than one chop inside me then.

“Supper—­slice of toast and an apple.”  Why the apple?  Why supper at all?

Oh, I’m hungry, hungry until I cry in my sleep when I dream about a muffin!  I thought at first that getting out of bed before my eyes are fairly open and turning myself into a circus actor by doing every kind of overhand, foot, arm and leg contortion that the mind of cruel man could invent to torture a human being with, would kill me before I had been at it a week, but when I read on page sixteen that as soon as all that horror was over I must jump right into the tub of cold water, I kicked, metaphorically speaking.  And I’ve been kicking ever since, literally to keep from freezing.