DEAR MRS. LARRABEE:—­

I gave you five dollars for the first picture and verses, which you, as a writer, regard more highly than I, who am merely a manufacturer.  Please accept twenty dollars for “The Folks Back Home,” on which I hope to make up my loss on the first card!  I insist on signing the despised verse with your initials.  In case R. L. should later come to mean something, you will be glad that a few thousand people have seen it.

Sincerely,
REUBEN SMALL.

The Hessian soldier andirons, the portrait over the Boynton mantel, and even Letty Boynton’s cape were identified on the first card, sooner or later, but it was obvious that Mrs. Larrabee had to have a picture for her verses and couldn’t be supposed to make one up “out of her head”; though Osh Popham declared it had been done again and again in other parts of the world.  Also it was agreed that, as Letty’s face was not distinguishable, nobody outside of Beulah could recognize her by her cape; and that anyhow it couldn’t make much difference, for if anybody wanted to spend fifteen cents on a card he would certainly buy the one about “the folks back home.”  The popularity of this was established by the fact that it was selling, not only in Beulah and Greentown, but in Boston, and in Racine, Wisconsin, and, it was rumored, even in Chicago.  The village milliner in Beulah had disposed of twenty-seven copies in thirteen days and the minister’s wife was universally conceded to be the most celebrated person in the State of New Hampshire.

Letty Boynton had an uncomfortable moment when she saw the first card, but common sense assured her that outside of a handful of neighbors no one would identify her home surroundings; meantime she was proud of Reba’s financial and artistic triumph in “The Folks Back Home” and generously glad that she had no share in it.

Twice during the autumn David had broken his silence, but only to send her a postal from some Western town, telling her that he should have no regular address for a time; that he was traveling for a publishing firm and felt ill-adapted to the business.  He hoped that she and the children were well, for he himself was not; etc., etc.

The twins had been photographed by Osh Popham, who was Jack of all trades and master of many, and a sight of their dimpled charms, curly heads, and straight little bodies would have gladdened any father’s heart, Letty thought.  However, she scorned to win David back by any such specious means.  If he didn’t care to know whether his children were hump-backed, bow-legged, cross-eyed, club-footed, or feeble-minded, why should she enlighten him?  This was her usual frame of mind, but in these last days of the year how she longed to pop the bewitching photographs and Reba’s Christmas cards into an envelope and send them to David.

But where?  No word at all for weeks and weeks, and then only a postal from St. Joseph, saying that he had given up his position on account of poor health.  Nothing in all this to keep Christmas on, thought Letty, and she knitted and crocheted and sewed with extra ardor that the twins’ stockings might be filled with bright things of her own making.