Jehoshaphat the Golden!  For two days Twickenham Town has been standing on its head and wriggling its heels in the air, and nothing has been talked about since it appeared except its appearance.  Every tongue in town has had its say, and everybody in town has been on somebody else’s porch and talked it over; and as for Miss Susanna, I believe she cried the whole night through, last night.  The first night she was too dazed to take it in.  The Twickenham Town Sentinel had it on its front page in the middle column in letters indecently large, Miss Bettie Simcoe says, and it certainly did make a sensation:  “Mrs. Roger S. Payne announces the engagement of her niece Elizabeth Hamilton Carter to Mr. Algernon Grice Baker, of Perryville, Wisconsin,” was what the Twickenham-Towners waked up and read on Wednesday the 1st of August, and if the dynamite-plant which has made business so good for Buzzard Brothers, the undertakers, had exploded, it couldn’t have caused more of a stir.  Twickenham wasn’t only amazed; it was indignant, and it couldn’t believe it was true.  But it was true, for the next day Miss Susanna got a letter from Elizabeth, telling her all about her engagement and that she would be home very soon and bring him with her, and it was the night of the day the letter was received that Miss Susanna went early to her room and locked her door for a while (that is, my door, for she is sleeping in my room during the August rush) and cried all night long.  I had to pretend I didn’t know, for she didn’t want me to know how hurt and distressed she was that Elizabeth should have so treated her, and as I didn’t sleep any more than she did, though, owing to very different feelings about Elizabeth, I made up my mind as to some things I would say to her when she got back.  And if she has never read “King Lear” I will see that she hears it read before very long with a glossary, and comments of my own on ingratitude and things of that sort.  Also she may hear some other things.

I have been perfectly furious with Elizabeth for the way she has treated the aunt who has been mother and father and all things else to her, but I can’t help laughing at the way Twickenham Town has taken the engagement.

As for Whythe—­I have wished for Billy a dozen times of late, for only Billy could see what a scream it is, the shock to Whythe’s vanity that Elizabeth’s beau is proving.  I can’t speak of it to any one else, and keeping it to myself is a great strain.  At first he seemed dazed with unbelief, and then he became scorny and sniffy and shruggy and smiley, and though he says little about his successor, whom he hasn’t seen yet, his manner indicates that as a substitute for himself he considers him an insult.