I have taught them several of the pretty songs; you should hear their piping voices—­and with their picture books and their gardens, they are very busy and happy indeed.

Their mother is positively illumined by the change her young folks.  Never in her life has she seen any country but this one of charred pines and sand.  I find her bending over the Cinderella book, liking it, and liking the children’s little gardens.

“We ain’t never had no flower garden,” she confided to me.  “Jim he ain’t had time, and I ain’t had time, and I ain’t never had no luck nohow.”

But the boy still means the most to me.  And you have found the reason.  It isn’t what I am doing for him, it is what he is doing for me.  If you could see his eyes!  They are a boy’s eyes now, not those of a little wild animal.  He is beginning to read the simple books you sent.  We began with “Mother Goose,” and I gave him first “The King of France and Forty Thousand Men.”  The “Oranges and Lemons” song carried on the Dick Whittington atmosphere which he had liked in my poem, with its bells of Old Bailey and Shoreditch.  He’ll know his London before I get through with him.

But we’ve struck even a deeper note.  One Sunday I was moved to take out with me your father’s old Bible.  There’s a rose between its leaves, kept for a talisman against the blue devils which sometimes get me in their grip.  Well, I took the old Bible out to our little amphitheater in the pines, and read, what do you think?  Not the Old Testament stories.

I read the Beatitudes, and my boy listened, and when I had finished, he asked, “What is blessed?  And who said that?”

I told him, and brought back to myself in the telling the vision of myself as a boy.  Oh, how far I have drifted from the dreams of that boy!  And if it had not been for you I should never have turned back.  And now this boy in the pines, and the boy who was I are learning together, step by step.  I am trying to forget the years between.  I am trying to take up life where it was before I was overthrown.  I can’t quite get hold of things yet as a man, for when I try, I feel a man’s bitterness.  But the boy believes, and I have shut the man in me away, until the boy grows up.

Does this sound fantastic?  To whom else would I dare write such a thing, but to you?  But you will understand.  I feel that I need make no apology.

Coming now to you and your work.  I can bring no optimism to bear, I suppose I should say that it is well.  But there is in me too much of the primitive masculine for that.  When a man cares for a woman he inevitably wants to shield her.  But what would you?  Shall a man let the thing which he would cherish be buffeted by the winds?

I don’t like to think of you in an office, with all your pretty woman instincts curbed to meet the stern formality of such a life.  I don’t like to think that any chief, however fatherly, shall dictate to you not only letters but rules of conduct.  I don’t like to think of you as hustled by a crowd at lunch time.  I don’t like to think of the great stone walls which shut you in.  I don’t want your wings clipped for such a cage.