No, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to Dr. John with such a real trouble as that!  All of a sudden I hugged the letter and the little book and laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.

Then, before I went to bed, I went round my garden and had family prayers with my flowers.  I do that because they are all the family I’ve got, and God knows that all His budding things need encouragement, whether it is a widow or a snowball-bush.  He’ll give it to us!

And I’m praying again as I sit here and watch for the doctor’s light to go out.  I hate to go to sleep and leave it burning, for he sits up so late and he is so gaunt and thin and tired-looking most times.  That’s what the last prayer is about, almost always—­sleep for him and no night call!

Leaf II.

A Love-Letter, Loaded.

The very worst page in this red book is the fifth.  It says—­

“Breakfast—­one slice of dry toast, one egg, fruit and a small cup of coffee, no sugar, no cream.”  And me with two Jersey cows full of the richest cream in Hillsboro, out in my meadow!

“Dinner, one small lean chop, slice of toast, spinach or lettuce salad.  No dessert or sweet.”  My poultry-yard is full of fat little chickens, and I wish I were a sheep if I have to eat lettuce and spinach for grass.  At least I’d have more than one chop inside me then.

“Supper—­slice of toast and an apple.”  Why the apple?  Why supper at all?

Oh, I’m hungry, hungry until I cry in my sleep when I dream about a muffin!  I thought at first that getting out of bed before my eyes are fairly open, and turning myself into a circus acrobat by doing every kind of overhand, foot, arm and leg contortion that the mind of cruel man could invent to torture a human being with, would kill me before I had been at it a week, but when I read on page sixteen that as soon as all that horror was over I must jump right into the tub of cold water, I kicked, metaphorically speaking.  And I’ve been kicking ever since, literally to keep from freezing.

But as cruel as freezing is, it doesn’t compare to the tortures of being melted.  Jane administers it to me, and her faithful heart is so wrung with compassion that she perspires almost as much as I do.  She wrings a linen sheet out in a cauldron of hot water and shrouds me in it—­and then more and more blanket windings envelop me until I am like the mummy of some Egyptian giantess.

Once I got so discouraged at the idea of having all this misery in this life that I mingled tears with the beads of perspiration that rolled down my cheeks, and she snatched me out of those steaming wrappings in less time than it takes to tell it, soused me in a tub of cold water, fed me with a chicken wing and mashed potatoes, and the information that I was “good-looking enough for anybody to eat up alive without all this foolishness,” all in a very few seconds.  Now I have to beg her to help me, and I heard her tell her nephew, who does the gardening, that she felt like an undertaker with such goings-on.  At any rate, if it all kills me it won’t be my fault if people tell untruths in saying that I was “beautiful in death.”