Dear Judy

I’ve composed a poem—a paean of victory.

Robin MacRae Smiled today.

It’s the truth! S. McB.

The John Grier Home,

April 13.

Dear Judy:

I am gratified to learn that you were gratified to learn that I am going to stay. I hadn’t realized it, but I am really getting sort of attached to orphans.

It’s an awful disappointment that Jervis has business which will keep you South so much longer. I am bursting with talk, and it is such a laborious nuisance having to write everything I want to say.

Of course I am glad that we are to have the building remodeled, and I think all of your ideas good, but I have a few extra good ones myself. It will be nice to have the new gymnasium and sleeping-porches, but, oh, my soul does long for cottages! The more I look into the internal workings of an orphan asylum, the more I realize that the only type of asylum that can compete with a private family is one on the cottage system. So long as the family is the unit of society, children should be hardened early to family life.

The problem that is keeping me awake at present is, What to do with the children while we are being made over? It is hard to live in a house and build it at the same time. How would it be if I rented a circus tent and pitched it on the lawn?

Also, when we plunge into our alterations, I want a few guest rooms where our children can come back when ill or out of work. The great secret of our lasting influence in their lives will be our watchful care afterward. What a terrible ALONE feeling it must give a person not to have a family hovering in the background! With all my dozens of aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers and cousins and brothers and sisters, I can’t visualize it. I’d be terrified and panting if I didn’t have lots of cover to run to. And for these forlorn little mites, somehow or other the John Grier Home must supply their need. So, dear people, send me half a dozen guest rooms, if you please.

Good-by, and I’m glad you didn’t put in the other woman. The very suggestion of somebody else taking over my own beautiful reforms before they were even started, stirred up all the opposition in me. I’m afraid I’m like Sandy—I canna think aught is dune richt except my ain hand is in ‘t.

Yours, for the present,

SALLIE McBRIDE.