So here I am, and like to be for a month.  Tell Mac theres four votes shut up here, and I can get them for him, if he can stop this monkey business.

Then go over to the Dago Church on Webster Avenue and put a dollar in Saint Anthony’s box.  He’ll see me out of this scrape, right enough.  Do it at once.  Now remember, go to Mac first; maybe you can get the dollar from him, and mind what you tell him.

Your husband, Tim Flannigan

From me to mother—­Mrs. Theodore McNAIR, hotel Hamilton, Bermuda.

Dearest Mother: 

I hope you will get this before you read the papers, and when you do read them, you are not to get excited and worried.  I am as well as can be, and a great deal safer than I ever remember to have been in my life.  We are quarantined, a lot of us, in Jim Wilson’s house, because his irreproachable Jap did a very reproachable thing—­took smallpox.  Now read on before you get excited.  His room has been fumigated, and we have been vaccinated.  I am well and happy.  I can’t be killed in a railway wreck or smashed when the car skids.  Unless I drown myself in my bath, or jump through a window, positively nothing can happen to me.  So gather up all your maternal anxieties and cast them to the Bermuda sharks.

Anne Brown is here—­see the papers for list—­and if she can not play propriety, Jimmy’s Aunt Selina can.  In fact, she doesn’t play at it; she works.  I have telephoned Lizette for some clothes—­enough for a couple of weeks, although Dallas promises to get us out sooner.  Now, dear, do go ahead and have a nice time, and on no account come home.  You could only have the carriage to stop in front of the house, and wave to me through a window.

Mother, I want you to do something for me.  You know who is down there, and—­this is awfully delicate, Mumsy—­but he’s a nice boy, and I thought I liked him.  I guess you know he has been rather attentive.  Now, I do like him, Mumsy, but not the way I thought I did, and I want you to—­very gently, of course—­to discourage him a little.  You know how I mean.  He’s a dear boy, but I am so tired of people who don’t know anything but horses and motors.

And, oh, yes,—­do you remember a girl named Lucille Mellon who was at school with you in Rome?  And that she married a man named Harbison?  Well, her son is here!  He builds railroads and bridges and things, and he even built himself an automobile down in South America, because he couldn’t afford to buy one, and burned wood in it!  Wood!  Think of it!

I wired father in Chicago for fear he would come rushing home.  The picture in the paper of the face at the basement window is supposed to be Mr. Harbison, but of course it isn’t any more like him than mine is like me.

Anne Brown mislaid her pearl collar when she took it off last night, and has fussed herself into a sick headache.  She declares it was stolen!  Some of the people are playing bridge, Betty Mercer is doing a cake walk to the RHAPSODIE HONGROISE—­Jim has no every-day music—­and the telephone is ringing.  We have received enough flowers for a funeral—­somebody sent Lollie a Gates Ajar, only with the gates shut.