I know this is an inexcusably long letter, but it is snowing so hard and you know how I like to talk.  I am sure Jerrine will enjoy the cards and we will be glad to get them.  Many things that are a comfort to us out here came from dear Mrs. ——.  Baby has the rabbit you gave her last Easter a year ago.  In Denver I was afraid my baby would grow up devoid of imagination.  Like all the kindergartners, she depended upon others to amuse her.  I was very sorry about it, for my castles in Spain have been real homes to me.  But there is no fear.  She has a block of wood she found in the blacksmith shop which she calls her “dear baby.”  A spoke out of a wagon wheel is “little Margaret,” and a barrel-stave is “bad little Johnny.”

Well, I must quit writing before you vote me a nuisance.  With lots of love to you,

  Your sincere friend,
    Elinore Rupert.

III

A BUSY, HAPPY SUMMER

     September 11, 1909.

Dear Mrs. Coney,—­

This has been for me the busiest, happiest summer I can remember.  I have worked very hard, but it has been work that I really enjoy.  Help of any kind is very hard to get here, and Mr. Stewart had been too confident of getting men, so that haying caught him with too few men to put up the hay.  He had no man to run the mower and he couldn’t run both the mower and the stacker, so you can fancy what a place he was in.

I don’t know that I ever told you, but my parents died within a year of each other and left six of us to shift for ourselves.  Our people offered to take one here and there among them until we should all have a place, but we refused to be raised on the halves and so arranged to stay at Grandmother’s and keep together.  Well, we had no money to hire men to do our work, so had to learn to do it ourselves.  Consequently I learned to do many things which girls more fortunately situated don’t even know have to be done.  Among the things I learned to do was the way to run a mowing-machine.  It cost me many bitter tears because I got sunburned, and my hands were hard, rough, and stained with machine oil, and I used to wonder how any Prince Charming could overlook all that in any girl he came to.  For all I had ever read of the Prince had to do with his “reverently kissing her lily-white hand,” or doing some other fool trick with a hand as white as a snowflake.  Well, when my Prince showed up he didn’t lose much time in letting me know that “Barkis was willing,” and I wrapped my hands in my old checked apron and took him up before he could catch his breath.  Then there was no more mowing, and I almost forgot that I knew how until Mr. Stewart got into such a panic.  If he put a man to mow, it kept them all idle at the stacker, and he just couldn’t get enough men.  I was afraid to tell him I could mow for fear he would forbid me to do so.  But