Thursday night.
You will be interested to hear that I have temporarily placed out Punch with two charming spinsters who have long been tottering on the brink of a child. They finally came last week, and said they would like to try one for a month to see what the sensation felt like.
They wanted, of course, a pretty ornament, dressed in pink and white and descended from the Mayflower. I told them that any one could bring up a daughter of the Mayflower to be an ornament to society, but the real feat was to bring up a son of an Italian organ-grinder and an Irish washerwoman. And I offered Punch. That Neapolitan heredity of his, aristically speaking, may turn out a glorious mixture, if the right environment comes along to choke out all the weeds.
I put it to them as a sporting proposition, and they were game. They have agreed to take him for one month and concentrate upon his remaking all their years of conserved force, to the end that he may be fit for adoption in some moral family. They both have a sense of humor and accomplishing characters, or I should never have dared to propose it. And really I believe it’s going to be the one way of taming our young fire-eater. They will furnish the affection and caresses and attention that in his whole abused little life he has never had.
They live in a fascinating old house with an Italian garden, and furnishings selected from the whole round world. It does seem like sacrilege to turn that destructive child loose in such a collection of treasures. But he hasn’t broken anything here for more than a month, and I believe that the Italian in him will respond to all that beauty.
I warned them that they must not shrink from any profanity that might issue from his pretty baby lips.
He departed last night in a very fancy automobile, and maybe I wasn’t glad to say good-by to our disreputable young man! He has absorbed just about half of my energy.
Friday.
The pendant arrived this morning. Many thanks! But you really ought not to have given me another; a hostess cannot be held accountable for all the things that careless guests lose in her house. It is far too pretty for my chain. I am thinking of having my nose pierced, Cingalese fashion, and wearing my new jewel where it will really show.
I must tell you that our Percy is putting some good constructive work into this asylum. He has founded the John Grier Bank, and has worked out all the details in a very professional and businesslike fashion, entirely incomprehensible to my non-mathematical mind. All of the older children possess properly printed check-books, and they are each to be paid five dollars a week for their services, such as going to school and accomplishing housework. They are then to pay the institution (by check) for their board and clothes, which will consume their five dollars. It looks like a vicious circle, but it’s really very educative ; they will comprehend the value of money before we dump them into a mercenary world. Those who are particularly good in lessons or work will receive an extra recompense. My head aches at the thought of the bookkeeping, but Percy waves that aside as a mere bagatelle. It is to be accomplished by our prize arithmeticians, and will train them for positions of trust. If Jervis hears of any opening for bank officials, let me know; I shall have a well-trained president, cashier, and paying-teller ready to be placed by this time next year.
Saturday.
Our doctor doesn’t like to be called “Enemy.” It hurts his feelings or his dignity or something of the sort; but since I will persist, despite his expostulations, he has finally retaliated with a nickname for me. He calls me “Miss Sally Lunn,”35 and is in a glow of pride at having achieved such an imaginative flight.
He and I have invented a new pastime: he talks Scotch, and I answer in Irish. Our conversations run like this:
“Good afthernoon to ye, docther. An’ how’s yer health the day?”
“Verra weel, verra weel. And how gaes it wi’ a’ the bairns?”
“Shure, they’re all av thim doin’ foin.”
“I’m gey glad to hear it. This saft weather is hard on folk. There’s muckle sickness aboot the kintra.”
“Hiven be praised it has not lighted here! But sit down, docther, an’ make yersilf at home. Will ye be afther havin’ a cup o’ tay?”
“Hoot, woman! I would na hae you fash yoursel’, but a wee drap tea winna coom amiss.”
“Whist! It’s no thruble at all.”
You may not think this a very dizzying excursion into frivolity; but I assure you, for one of Sandy’s dignity, it’s positively riotous. The man has been in a heavenly temper ever since I came back; not a single cross word. I am beginning to think I may reform him as well as Punch.
This letter must be about long enough even for you; I’ve been writing it bit by bit for three days, whenever I happened to pass my desk.
Yours as ever,
SALLIE.
P.S. I don’t think much of your vaunted prescription for hair tonic. Either the druggist didn’t mix it right, or Jane didn’t apply it with discretion. I stuck to the pillow this morning.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Saturday.
Dear Gordon:
Your letter of Thursday is at hand, and extremely silly I consider it. Of course I am not trying to let you down easy; that isn’t my way. If I let you down at all, it will be suddenly and with an awful bump. But I honestly didn’t realize that it had been three weeks since I wrote. Please excuse!
Also, my dear sir, I have to bring you to account. You were in New York last week, and you never ran up to see us. You thought we wouldn’t find it out, but we heard—and are insulted.
Would you like an outline of my day’s activities? Wrote monthly report for trustees’ meeting. Audited accounts. Entertained agent of State Charities Aid Association for luncheon. Supervised children’s menus for next ten days. Dictated five letters to families who have our children. Visited our little feeble-minded Loretta Higgins (pardon the reference; I know you don’t like me to mention the feeble-minded), who is being boarded out in a nice comfortable family, where she is learning to work. Came back to tea and a conference with the doctor about sending a child with tubercular glands to a sanatorium. Read an article on cottage versus congregate system for housing dependent children. (We do need cottages! I wish you’d send us a few for a Christmas present.) And now at nine o’clock I’m sleepily beginning a letter to you. Do you know many young society girls who can point to such a useful day as that?
Oh, I forgot to say that I stole ten minutes from my accounts this morning to install a new cook. Our Sallie Washington-Johnston, who cooked fit for the angels, had a dreadful, dreadful temper and terrorized poor Noah, our super-excellent furnace-man, to the point of giving notice. We couldn’t spare Noah. He’s more useful to the institution than its superintendent, and so Sallie Washington-Johnston is no more.
When I asked the new cook her name, she replied, “Ma name is Suzanne Estelle, but ma friends call me Pet.” Pet cooked the dinner to-night, but I must say that she lacks Sallie’s delicate touch. I am awfully disappointed that you didn’t visit us while Sallie was still here. You would have taken away an exalted opinion of my housekeeping.
Drowsiness overcame me at that point, and it’s now two days later.
Poor neglected Gordon! It has just occurred to me that you never got thanked for the modeling-clay which came two weeks ago, and it was such an unusually intelligent present that I should have telegraphed my appreciation. When I opened the box and saw all that nice messy putty stuff, I sat down on the spot and created a statue of Singapore. The children love it; and it is very good to have the handicraft side of their training encouraged.
After a careful study of American history, I have determined that nothing is so valuable to a future president as an early obligatory unescapable performance of chores.
Therefore I have divided the daily work of this institution into a hundred parcels, and the children rotate weekly through a succession of unaccustomed tasks. Of course they do everything badly, for just as they learn how, they progress to something new. It would be infinitely easier for us
to follow Mrs. Lippett’s immoral custom of keeping each child sentenced for life to a well-learned routine; but when the temptation assails me, I recall the dreary picture of Florence Henty, who polished the brass door-knobs of this institution for seven years—and I sternly shove the children on.
I get angry every time I think of Mrs. Lippett. She had exactly the point of view of a Tammany politician—no slightest sense of service to society; her only interest in the John Grier Home was to get a living out of it.
Wednesday.
What new branch of learning do you think I have introduced into my asylum? Table manners!
I never had any idea that it was such a lot of trouble to teach children how to eat and drink. Their favorite method is to put their mouths down to their mugs and lap their milk like kittens. Good manners are not merely snobbish ornaments, as Mrs. Lippett’s régime appeared to believe; they mean self-discipline and thought for others, and my children have got to learn them.
That woman never allowed them to talk at their meals, and I am having the most dreadful time getting any conversation out of them above a frightened whisper. So I have instituted the custom of the entire staff, myself included, sitting with them at the table, and directing the talk along cheerful and improving lines. Also I have established a small, very strict training-table, where the little dears, in relays, undergo a week of steady badgering. Our uplifting table conversations run like this:
“Yes, Tom, Napoleon Bonaparte was a very great man—elbows off the table. He possessed a tremendous power of concentrating his mind on whatever he wanted to have; and that is the way to accomplish—don’t snatch, Susan; ask politely for the bread, and Carrie will pass it to you.—But he was an example of the fact that selfish thought just for oneself, without considering the lives of others, will come to disaster in the—Tom! Keep your mouth shut when you chew—and after the battle of Waterloo—let Sadie’s cooky alone—his fall was all the greater because—Sadie Kate, you may leave the table. It makes no difference what he did. Under no provocation does a lady slap a gentleman.”
Two more days have passed; this is the same kind of meandering letter I write to Judy. At least, my dear man, you can’t complain that I haven’t been thinking about you this week! I know you hate to be told all about the asylum, but I can’t help it, for it’s all I know. I don’t have five minutes a day to read the papers. The big outside world has dropped away. My interests all lie on the inside of this little iron inclosure.
I am at present,
S. MCBRIDE,
Superintendent of the
John Grier Home.
Thursday.
Dear Enemy:
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Hasn’t that a very philosophical, detached, Lord of the Universe sound? It comes from Thoreau, whom I am assiduously reading at present. As you see, I have revolted against your literature and taken to my own again. The last two evenings have been devoted to “Walden,”36 a book as far removed as possible from the problems of the dependent child.
Did you ever read old Henry David Thoreau? You really ought; I think you’d find him a congenial soul. Listen to this: “Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. It would be better if there were but one habitation to a square mile, as where I live.” A pleasant, expansive, neeborlike man he must have been! He minds me in some ways o’Sandy.
This is to tell you that we have a placing-out agent visiting us. She is about to dispose of four chicks, one of them Thomas Kehoe. What do you think? Ought we to risk it? The place she has in mind for him is a farm in a no-license portion of Connecticut, where he will work hard for his board, and live in the farmer’s family. It sounds exactly the right thing, and we can’t keep him here forever; he’ll have to be turned out some day into a world full of whisky.
I’m sorry to tear you away from that cheerful work on “Dementia Precox,” but I’d be most obliged if you’d drop in here toward eight o’clock for a conference with the agent.
I am, as usual,
S. MCBRIDE.
June 17.
My dear Judy:
Betsy has perpetrated a most unconscionable trick upon a pair of adopting parents. They have traveled East from Ohio in their touring-car for the dual purpose of seeing the country and picking up a daughter. They appear to be the leading citizens of their town, whose name at the moment escapes me; but it’s a very important town. It has electric lights and gas, and Mr. Leading Citizen owns the controlling interest in both plants. With a wave of his hand he could plunge that entire town into darkness; but fortunately he’s a kind man, and won’t do anything so harsh, not even if they fail to reëlect him mayor. He lives in a brick house with a slate roof and two towers, and has a deer and fountain and lots of nice shade-trees in the yard. (He carries its photograph in his pocket.) They are good-natured, generous, kind-hearted, smiling people, and a little fat; you can see what desirable parents they would make.
Well, we had exactly the daughter of their dreams, only, as they came without giving us notice, she was dressed in a flannellet nightgown, and her face was dirty. They looked Caroline over, and were not impressed; but they thanked us politely, and said they would bear her in mind. They wanted to visit the New York Orphanage before deciding. We knew well that, if they saw that superior assemblage of children, our poor little Caroline would never have a chance.
Then Betsy rose to the emergency. She graciously invited them to motor over to her house for tea that afternoon and inspect one of our little wards who would be visiting her baby niece. Mr. and Mrs. Leading Citizen do not know many people in the East, and they haven’t been receiving the invitations that they feel are their due; so they were quite innocently pleased at the prospect of a little social diversion. The moment they had retired to the hotel for luncheon, Betsy called up her car, and rushed baby Caroline over to her house. She stuffed her into baby niece’s best pink-and-white embroidered frock, borrowed a hat of Irish lace, some pink socks and white slippers, and set her picturesquely upon the green lawn under a spreading beech-tree. A white-aproned nurse (borrowed also from baby niece) plied her with bread and milk and gaily colored toys. By the time prospective parents arrived, our Caroline, full of food and contentment, greeted them with cooes of delight. From the moment their eyes fell upon her they were ravished with desire. Not a suspicion crossed their unobservant minds that this sweet little rosebud was the child of the morning. And so, a few formalities having been complied with, it really looks as though baby Caroline would live in the Towers and grow into a leading citizen.
I must really get to work, without any further delay, upon the burning question of new clothes for our girls.
With the highest esteem, I am,
D’r Ma’am
Y’r most ob’d’t and h’mble serv’t,
SAL. MCBRIDE.
June 19th.
My dearest Judy:
Listen to the grandest innovation of all, and one that will delight your heart.
NO MORE BLUE GINGHAM!
Feeling that this aristocratic neighborhood of country estates might contain valuable food for our asylum, I have of late been moving in the village social circles, and at a luncheon yesterday I dug out a beautiful and charming widow who wears delectable, flowing gowns that she designs herself. She confided to me that she would have loved to have been a dressmaker, if she had only been born with a needle in her mouth instead of a golden spoon. She says she never sees a pretty girl badly dressed but she longs to take her in hand and make her over. Did you ever hear anything so apropos? From the moment she opened her lips she was a marked man.
“I can show you fifty-nine badly dressed girls,” said I to her, “and you have got to come back with me and plan their new clothes and make them beautiful.”
She expostulated; but in vain. I led her out to her automobile, shoved her in, and murmured, “John Grier Home” to the chauffeur. The first inmate our eyes fell upon was
Sadie Kate, just fresh, I judge, from hugging the molasses-barrel; and a shocking spectacle she was for any esthetically minded person. In addition to the stickiness, one stocking was coming down, her pinafore was buttoned crookedly, and she had lost a hair-ribbon. But—as always—completely at ease, she welcomed us with a cheery grin, and offered the lady a sticky paw.
“Now,” said I, in triumph, “you see how much we need you. What can you do to make Sadie Kate beautiful.”
“Wash her,” said Mrs. Livermore.
Sadie Kate was marched to my bathroom. When the scrubbing was finished and the hair strained back and the stocking restored to seemly heights, I returned her for a second inspection—a perfectly normal little orphan. Mrs. Livermore turned her from side to side, and studied her long and earnestly.
Sadie Kate by nature is a beauty, a wild, dark, Gipsyish little colleen; she looks fresh from the wind-swept moors of Connemara. But, oh, we have managed to rob her of her birthright with this awful institution uniform!
After five minutes’ silent contemplation, Mrs. Livermore raised her eyes to mine.
“Yes, my dear, you need me.”
And then and there we formed our plans. She is to head the committee on CLOTHES. She is to choose three friends to help her; and they, with the two dozen best sewers among the girls and our sewing-teacher and five sewing-machines, are going to make over the looks of this institution. And the charity is all on our side. We are supplying Mrs. Livermore with the profession that Providence robbed her of. Wasn’t it clever of me to find her? I woke this morning at dawn and crowed!
Lots more news,—I could run into a second volume,—but I am going to send this letter to town by Mr. Witherspoon, who, in a very high collar and the blackest of evening clothes, is on the point of departure for a barn dance at the country club. I told him to pick out the nicest girls he danced with to come and tell stories to my children.