Dear Judy

Your Jamaica letter is here, and I’m glad to learn that Judy, Junior, enjoys traveling. Write me every detail about your house, and send some photographs, so I can see you in it. What fun it must be to have a boat of your own that chugs about those entertaining seas! Have you worn all of your eighteen white dresses yet? And aren’t you glad now that I made you wait about buying a Panama hat till you reached Kingston?

We are running along here very much as usual without anything exciting to chronicle. You remember little Maybelle Fuller, don’t you—the chorus girl’s daughter whom our doctor doesn’t like? We have placed her out. I tried to make the woman take Hattie Heaphy instead,—the quiet little one who stole the communion cup,—but no, indeed! Maybelle’s eyelashes won the day. After all, as poor Marie says, the chief thing is to be pretty. All else in life depends on that.

When I got home last week, after my dash to New York, I made a brief speech to the children. I told them that I had just been seeing Aunt Judy off on a big ship, and I am embarrassed to have to report that the interest—at least on the part of the boys—immediately abandoned Aunt Judy and centered upon the ship. How many tons of coal did she burn a day? Was she long enough to reach from the carriage house to the Indian camp? Were there any guns aboard, and if a privateer should attack her, could she hold her own? In case of a mutiny, could the captain shoot down anybody he chose, and wouldn’t he be hanged when he got to shore?

I had ignominiously to call upon Sandy to finish my speech. I realize that the best-equipped feminine mind in the world can’t cope with the peculiar class of questions that originate in a thirteen-year boy’s brain.

As a result of their seafaring interest, the doctor conceived the idea of inviting seven of the oldest and most alert lads to spend the day with him in New York and see with their own eyes an oceanliner. They rose at five yesterday morning, caught the 7:30 train, and had the most wonderful adventure that has happened in all their seven lives. They visited one of the big liners (Sandy knows the Scotch engineer), and were conducted from the bottom of the hold to the top of the crow’s-nest, and then had luncheon on board. And after luncheon they visited the aquarium and the top of the Singer Building, and took the subway uptown to spend an hour with the birds of America in their habitats. Sandy with great difficulty pried them away from the Natural History Museum in time to catch the 6:15 train. Dinner in the dining-car. They inquired with great particularity how much it was costing, and when they heard that it was the same, no matter how much you ate, they drew deep breaths and settled quietly and steadily to the task of not allowing their host to be cheated. The railroad made nothing on that party, and all the tables around stopped eating to stare. One traveler asked the doctor if it was a boarding school he had in charge; so you can see how the manners and bearing of our lads have picked up. I don’t wish to boast, but no one would ever have asked such a question concerning seven of Mrs. Lippett’s youngsters. “Are they bound for a reformatory?” would have been the natural question after observing the table manners of her offspring.

My little band tumbled in toward ten o’clock, excitedly babbling a mess of statistics about reciprocating compound engines and watertight bulkheads, devil-fish and sky-scrapers and birds of paradise. I thought I should never get them to bed. And, oh, but they had had a glorious day! I do wish I could manage breaks in the routine oftener. It gives them a new outlook on life and makes them more like normal children. Wasn’t it really nice of Sandy? But you should have seen that man’s behavior when I tried to thank him. He waved me aside in the middle of a sentence, and growlingly asked Miss Snaith if she couldn’t economize a little on carbolic acid. The house smelt like a hospital.

I must tell you that Punch is back with us again, entirely renovated as to manners. I am looking for a family to adopt him.

I had hoped those two intelligent spinsters would see their way to keeping him forever, but they want to travel, and they feel he’s too consuming of their liberty. I inclose a sketch in colored chalk of your steamer, which he has just completed. There is some doubt as to the direction in which it is going; it looks as though it might progress backward and end in Brooklyn. Owing to the loss of my blue pencil, our flag has had to adopt the Italian colors.

The three figures on the bridge are you and Jervis and the baby. I am pained to note that you carry your daughter by the back of her neck, as if she were a kitten. That is not the way we handle babies in the J. G. H. nursery. Please also note that the artist has given Jervis his full due in the matter of legs. When I asked Punch what had become of the captain, he said that the captain was inside, putting coal on the fire. Punch was terribly impressed, as well he might be, when he heard that your steamer burned three hundred wagonloads a day, and he naturally supposed that all hands had been piped to the stokehole.

BOW! WOW!

That’s a bark from Sing. I told him I was writing to you, and he responded instantly.

We both send love.

Yours,

SALLIE.