You should see the sky!  There’s the queerest orange-coloured light over everything.  We’re going to have a storm.

It commenced just that moment with tremendously big drops and all the shutters banging.  I had to run to close the windows, while Carrie flew to the attic with an armful of milk pans to put under the places where the roof leaks and then, just as I was resuming my pen, I remembered that I’d left a cushion and rug and hat and Matthew Arnold’s poems under a tree in the orchard, so I dashed out to get them, all quite soaked.  The red cover of the poems had run into the inside; Dover Beach in the future will be washed by pink waves.

A storm is awfully disturbing in the country.  You are always having to think of so many things that are out of doors and getting spoiled.

Thursday

Daddy!  Daddy!  What do you think?  The postman has just come with two letters.

1st.  My story is accepted. $50.

ALORS!  I’m an author.

2nd.  A letter from the college secretary.  I’m to have a scholarship for two years that will cover board and tuition.  It was founded for `marked proficiency in English with general excellency in other lines.’  And I’ve won it!  I applied for it before I left, but I didn’t have an idea I’d get it, on account of my Freshman bad work in maths and Latin.  But it seems I’ve made it up.  I am awfully glad, Daddy, because now I won’t be such a burden to you.  The monthly allowance will be all I’ll need, and maybe I can earn that with writing or tutoring or something.

I’m longing to go back and begin work. 
                   Yours ever,
                                           Jerusha Abbott,

Author of When the Sophomores Won
the Game.  For sale at all news
stands, price ten cents.

26th September
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

Back at college again and an upper classman.  Our study is better than ever this year—­faces the South with two huge windows and oh! so furnished.  Julia, with an unlimited allowance, arrived two days early and was attacked with a fever for settling.

We have new wall paper and oriental rugs and mahogany chairs—­ not painted mahogany which made us sufficiently happy last year, but real.  It’s very gorgeous, but I don’t feel as though I belonged in it; I’m nervous all the time for fear I’ll get an ink spot in the wrong place.

And, Daddy, I found your letter waiting for me—­pardon—­I mean your secretary’s.

Will you kindly convey to me a comprehensible reason why I should not accept that scholarship?  I don’t understand your objection in the least.  But anyway, it won’t do the slightest good for you to object, for I’ve already accepted it and I am not going to change!  That sounds a little impertinent, but I don’t mean it so.

I suppose you feel that when you set out to educate me, you’d like to finish the work, and put a neat period, in the shape of a diploma, at the end.