I don’t think I am telling you at all what I started to say, which was this: 

Although my feelings are still hurt, for it is very humiliating to be picked up and moved about by an arbitrary, peremptory, unreasonable, omnipotent, invisible Providence, still, when a man has been as kind and generous and thoughtful as you have heretofore been towards me, I suppose he has a right to be an arbitrary, peremptory, unreasonable, invisible Providence if he chooses, and so—­ I’ll forgive you and be cheerful again.  But I still don’t enjoy getting Sallie’s letters about the good times they are having in camp!

However—­we will draw a veil over that and begin again.

I’ve been writing and writing this summer; four short stories finished and sent to four different magazines.  So you see I’m trying to be an author.  I have a workroom fixed in a corner of the attic where Master Jervie used to have his rainy-day playroom.  It’s in a cool, breezy corner with two dormer windows, and shaded by a maple tree with a family of red squirrels living in a hole.

I’ll write a nicer letter in a few days and tell you all the farm news.

We need rain. 
                               Yours as ever,
          
                                         Judy

10th August
Mr. Daddy-Long-Legs,

Sir:  I address you from the second crotch in the willow tree by the pool in the pasture.  There’s a frog croaking underneath, a locust singing overhead and two little `devil downheads’ darting up and down the trunk.  I’ve been here for an hour; it’s a very comfortable crotch, especially after being upholstered with two sofa cushions.  I came up with a pen and tablet hoping to write an immortal short story, but I’ve been having a dreadful time with my heroine—­I can’t make her behave as I want her to behave; so I’ve abandoned her for the moment, and am writing to you.  (Not much relief though, for I can’t make you behave as I want you to, either.)

If you are in that dreadful New York, I wish I could send you some of this lovely, breezy, sunshiny outlook.  The country is Heaven after a week of rain.

Speaking of Heaven—­do you remember Mr. Kellogg that I told you about last summer?—­the minister of the little white church at the Corners.  Well, the poor old soul is dead—­last winter of pneumonia.  I went half a dozen times to hear him preach and got very well acquainted with his theology.  He believed to the end exactly the same things he started with.  It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity.  I hope he is enjoying his harp and golden crown; he was so perfectly sure of finding them!  There’s a new young man, very consequential, in his place.  The congregation is pretty dubious, especially the faction led by Deacon Cummings.  It looks as though there was going to be an awful split in the church.  We don’t care for innovations in religion in this neighbourhood.