Her defense consisted in hysterical assertions that she loved the children, and had done her duty as she saw it. She did not believe in giving medicine to babies; she thought drugs bad for their poor little stomachs. You can imagine Sandy! Oh, dear! oh, dear! To think I missed it!Well, the tempest raged for three days, and Sadie Kate nearly ran her little legs off carrying peppery messages back and forth between us and the doctor. It is only under stress that I communicate with him by telephone, as he has an interfering old termagant of a housekeeper who "listens in" on the down-stairs switch. I don't wish the scandalous secrets of the John Grier spread abroad. The doctor demanded Miss Snaith's instant dismissal, and I refused. Of course she is a vague, unfocused, inefficient old thing, but she does love the children, and with proper supervision is fairly useful.At least, in the light of her exalted family connections, I can't pack her off in disgrace like a drunken cook. I am hoping in time to eliminate her by a process of delicate suggestion; perhaps I can make her feel that her health requires a winter in California. And also, no matter what the doctor wants, so positive and dictatorial is his manner that just out of self-respect one must take the other side. When he states that the world is round, I instantly assert it to be triangular.Finally, after three pleasantly exhilarating days, the whole business settled itself. An apology (a very dilute one) was extracted from him for being so unkind to the poor lady, and full confession, with promises for the future, was drawn from her. It seems that she couldn't bear to make the little dears take the stuff, but, for obvious reasons, she couldn't bear to cross Dr. MacRae, so she hid the last fourteen bottles in a dark corner of the cellar. Just how she was planning to dispose of her loot I don't know. Can you pawn cod-liver oil?LATER.Peace negotiations had just ended this afternoon, and Sandy had made a dignified exit, when the Hon. Cyrus Wykoff was announced. Two enemies in the course of an hour are really too much!The Hon. Cy was awfully impressed with the new dining room, especially when he heard that Betsy had put on those rabbits with her own lily-white hands. Stenciling rabbits on walls, he allows, is a fitting pursuit for a woman, but an executive position like mine is a trifle out of her sphere. He thinks it would be far wiser if Mr. Pendleton did not give me such free scope in the spending of his money.While we were still contemplating Betsy's mural flight, an awful crash came from the pantry, and we found Gladiola Murphy weeping among the ruins of five yellow plates. It is sufficiently shattering to my nerves to hear these crashes when I am alone, but it is peculiarly shattering when receiving a call from an unsympathetic trustee.I shall cherish that set of dishes to the best of my ability, but if you wish to see your gift in all its uncracked beauty, I should advise you to hurry North, and visit the John Grier Home without delay.Yours as ever,SALLIE.March 26. My dear Judy:I have just been holding an interview with a woman who wants to take a baby home to surprise her husband. I had a hard time convincing her that, since he is to support the child, it might be a delicate attention to consult him about its adoption. She argued stubbornly that it was none of his business, seeing that the onerous work of washing and dressing and training would fall upon her. I am really beginning to feel sorry for men. Some of them seem to have very few rights.Even our pugnacious doctor I suspect of being a victim of domestic tyranny, and his housekeeper's at that. It is scandalous the way Maggie McGurk neglects the poor man. I have had to put him in charge of an orphan. Sadie Kate, with a very housewifely air, is this moment sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug sewing buttons on his overcoat while he is upstairs tending babies.You would never believe it, but Sandy and I are growing quite confidential in a dour Scotch fashion. It has become his habit, when homeward bound after his professional calls, to chug up to our door about four in the afternoon, and make the rounds of the house to make sure that we are not developing cholera morbus or infanticide or anything catching, and then present himself at four-thirty at my library door to talk over our mutual problems.Does he come to see me? Oh, no, indeed; he comes to get tea and toast and marmalade. The man hath a lean and hungry look. His housekeeper doesn't feed him enough. As soon as I get the upper hand of him a little more, I am going to urge him on to revolt.Meanwhile he is very grateful for something to eat, but oh, so funny in his attempts at social grace! At first he would hold a cup of tea in one hand, a plate of muffins in the other, and then search blankly for a third hand to eat them with. Now he has solved the problem. He turns in his toes and brings his knees together; then he folds his napkin into a long, narrow wedge that fills the crack between them, thus forming a very workable pseudo lap; after that he sits with tense muscles until the tea is drunk. I suppose I ought to provide a table, but the spectacle of Sandy with his toes turned in is the one gleam of amusement that my day affords.The postman is just driving in with, I trust, a letter from you. Letters make a very interesting break in the monotony of asylum life. If you wish to keep this superintendent contented, you'd better write often.. . . . . . . .Mail received and contents noted.Kindly convey my thanks to Jervis for three alligators in a swamp. He shows rare artistic taste in the selection of his post cards. Your seven-page illustrated letter from Miami arrives at the same time. I should have known Jervis from the palm tree perfectly, even without the label, as the tree has so much the more hair of the two. Also, I have a polite bread-and-butter letter from my nice young man in Washington, and a book from him, likewise a box of candy. The bag of peanuts for the kiddies he has shipped by express. Did you ever know such assiduity?Jimmie favors me with the news that he is coming to visit me as soon as father can spare him from the factory. The poor boy does hate that factory so! It isn't that he is lazy; he just simply isn't interested in overalls. But father can't understand such a lack of taste. Having built up the factory, he of course has developed a passion for overalls, which should have been inherited by his eldest son. I find it awfully convenient to have been born a daughter; I am not asked to like overalls, but am left free to follow any morbid career I may choose, such as this.To return to my mail: There arrives an advertisement from a wholesale grocer, saying that he has exceptionally economical brands of oatmeal, rice, flour, prunes, and dried apples that he packs specially for prisons and charitable institutions. Sounds nutritious, doesn't it?I also have letters from a couple of farmers, each of whom would like to have a strong, husky boy of fourteen who is not afraid of work, their object being to give him a good home. These good homes appear with great frequency just as the spring planting is coming on. When we investigated one of them last week, the village minister, in answer to our usual question, "Does he own any property?" replied in a very guarded manner, "I think he must own a corkscrew."You would hardly credit some of the homes that we have investigated. We found a very prosperous country family the other day, who lived huddled together in three rooms in order to keep the rest of their handsome house clean. The fourteen-year girl they wished to adopt, by way of a cheap servant, was to sleep in the same tiny room with their own three children. Their kitchen-dining-parlor apartment was more cluttered up and unaired than any city tenement I ever saw, and the thermometer at eighty-four. One could scarcely say they were living there; they were rather COOKING. You may be sure they got no girl from us!I have made one invariable rule—every other is flexible. No child is to be placed out unless the proposed family can offer better advantages than we can give. I mean than we are going to be able to give in the course of a few months, when we get ourselves made over into a model institution. I shall have to confess that at present we are still pretty bad.But anyway, I am very CHOOSEY in regard to homes, and I reject three-fourths of those that offer.LATER.Gordon has made honorable amends to my children. His bag of peanuts is here, made of burlap and three feet high.Do you remember the dessert of peanuts and maple sugar they used to give us at college? We turned up our noses, but ate. I am instituting it here, and I assure you we don't turn up our noses. It is a pleasure to feed children who have graduated from a course of Mrs. Lippett; they are pathetically grateful for small blessings.You can't complain that this letter is too short.Yours,On the verge of writer's cramp,S. McB.THE JOHN GRIER HOME,Off and on, all day Friday.Dear Judy:You will be interested to hear that I have encountered another enemy—the doctor's housekeeper. I had talked to the creature several times over the telephone, and had noted that her voice was not distinguished by the soft, low accents that mark the caste of "Vere de Vere"; but now I have seen her. This morning, while returning from the village, I made a slight detour, and passed our doctor's house. Sandy is evidently the result of environment—olive green, with a mansard roof and the shades pulled down. You would think he had just been holding a funeral.I don't wonder that the amenities of life have somewhat escaped the poor man. After studying the outside of his house, I was filled with curiosity to see if the inside matched.Having sneezed five times before breakfast this morning, I decided to go in and consult him professionally. To be sure, he is a children's specialist, but sneezes are common to all ages. So I boldly marched up the steps and rang the bell.Hark! What sound is that that breaks upon our revelry? The Hon. Cy's voice, as I live, approaching up the stairs. I've letters to write, and I can't be tormented by his blether, so I am rushing Jane to the door with orders to look him firmly in the eye and tell him I am out.. . . . . . . .On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined. He's gone.But those eight stars represent eight agonizing minutes spent in the dark of my library closet. The Hon. Cy received Jane's communication with the affable statement that he would sit down and wait. Whereupon he entered and sat. But did Jane leave me to languish in the closet? No; she enticed him to the nursery to see the AWFUL thing that Sadie Kate has done. The Hon. Cy loves to see awful things, particularly when done by Sadie Kate. I haven't an idea what scandal Jane is about to disclose; but no matter, he has gone.Where was I? Oh, yes; I had rung the doctor's bell.The door was opened by a large, husky person with her sleeves rolled up. She looked very businesslike, with a hawk's nose and cold gray eyes."Well?" said she, her tone implying that I was a vacuum-cleaning agent."Good morning." I smiled affably, and stepped inside. "Is this Mrs. McGurk?""It is," said she. "An' ye'll be the new young woman in the orphan asylum?""I am that," said I. "Is himself at home?""He is not," said she."But this is his office hour.""He don't keep it regular'.""He ought," said I, sternly. "Kindly tell him that Miss McBride called to consult him, and ask him to look in at the John Grier Home this afternoon.""Ump'!" grunted Mrs. McGurk, and closed the door so promptly that she shut in the hem of my skirt.When I told the doctor this afternoon, he shrugged his shoulders, and observed that that was Maggie's gracious way."And why do you put up with Maggie?" said I."And where would I find any one better?" said he. "Doing the work for a lone man who comes as irregularly to meals as a twenty-four-hour day will permit is no sinecure. She furnishes little sunshine in the home, but she does manage to produce a hot dinner at nine o'clock at night."Just the same, I am willing to wager that her hot dinners are neither delicious nor well served. She's an inefficient, lazy old termagant, and I know why she doesn't like me. She imagines that I want to steal away the doctor and oust her from a comfortable position, something of a joke, considering. But I am not undeceiving her; it will do the old thing good to worry a little. She may cook him better dinners, and fatten him up a trifle. I understand that fat men are good-natured.TEN O'CLOCK.I don't know what silly stuff I have been writing to you off and on all day, between interruptions. It has got to be night at last, and I am too tired to do so much as hold up my head. Your song tells the sad truth, "There is no joy in life but sleep."I bid you good night.S. McB.Isn't the English language absurd? Look at those forty monosyllables in a row!J. G. H.,April 1.Dear Judy:I have placed out Isador Gutschneider. His new mother is a Swedish woman, fat and smiling, with blue eyes and yellow hair. She chose him out of the whole nurseryful of children because he was the brunettest baby there. She has always loved brunettes, but in her most ambitious dreams has never hoped to have one of her own. His name is going to be changed to Oscar Carlson, after his new dead uncle.My first trustees' meeting is to occur next Wednesday. I confess that I am not looking forward to it with impatience—especially as an inaugural address by me will be its chief feature. I wish our president were here to back me up! But at least I am sure of one thing. I am never going to adopt the Uriah Heepish attitude toward trustees that characterized Mrs. Lippett's manners. I shall treat "first Wednesdays" as a pleasant social diversion, my day at home, when the friends of the asylum gather for discussion and relaxation; and I shall endeavor not to let our pleasures discommode the orphans. You see how I have taken to heart the unhappy experiences of that little Jerusha.Your last letter has arrived, and no suggestion in it of traveling North. Isn't it about time that you were turning your faces back toward Fifth Avenue? Hame is hame, be 't ever sae hamely. Don't you marvel at the Scotch that flows so readily from my pen? Since being acquent' wi' Sandy, I hae gathered a muckle new vocabulary. The dinner gong! I leave you, to devote a revivifying half-hour to mutton hash. We eat to live in the John Grier Home.SIX O'CLOCK.The Hon. Cy has been calling again. He drops in with great frequency, hoping to catch me IN DELICTU. How I do not like that man! He is a pink, fat, puffy old thing, with a pink, fat, puffy soul. I was in a very cheery, optimistic frame of mind before his arrival, but now I shall do nothing but grumble for the rest of the day.He deplores all of the useless innovations that I am endeavoring to introduce, such as a cheerful playroom, prettier clothes, baths, and better food and fresh air and play and fun and ice-cream and kisses. He says that I will unfit these children to occupy the position in life that God has called them to occupy.At that my Irish blood came to the surface, and I told him that if God had planned to make all of these 113 little children into useless, ignorant, unhappy citizens, I was going to fool God! That we weren't educating them out of their class in the least. We were educating them INTO their natural class much more effectually than is done in the average family. We weren't trying to force them into college if they hadn't any brains, as happens with rich men's sons; and we weren't putting them to work at fourteen if they were naturally ambitious, as happens with poor men's sons. We were watching them closely and individually and discovering their level. If our children showed an aptitude to become farm laborers and nurse-maids, we were going to teach them to be the best possible farm laborers and nurse-maids; and if they showed a tendency to become lawyers, we would turn them into honest, intelligent, open-minded lawyers. (He's a lawyer himself, but certainly not an open-minded one.)He grunted when I had finished my remarks, and stirred his tea vigorously. Whereupon I suggested that perhaps he needed another lump of sugar, and dropped it in, and left him to absorb it.The only way to deal with trustees is with a firm and steady hand. You have to keep them in their places.Oh, my dear! that smudge in the corner was caused by Singapore's black tongue. He is trying to send you an affectionate kiss. Poor Sing thinks he's a lap dog—isn't it a tragedy when people mistake their vocations? I myself am not always certain that I was born an orphan asylum superintendent.Yours, til deth,S. McB.SUPERINTENDENT'S OFFICE, JOHN GRIER HOME,April 4.THE PENDLETON FAMILY,Palm Beach, Florida.Dear Sir and Madam:I have weathered my first visitors' day, and made the trustees a beautiful speech. Everybody said it was a beautiful speech—even my enemies.Mr. Gordon Hallock's recent visit was exceptionally opportune; I gleaned from him many suggestions as to how to carry an audience."Be funny."—I told about Sadie Kate and a few other cherubs that you don't know."Keep it concrete and fitted to the intelligence of your audience."—I watched the Hon. Cy, and never said a thing that he couldn't understand."Flatter your hearers."—I hinted delicately that all of these new reforms were due to the wisdom and initiative of our peerless trustees."Give it a high moral tone, with a dash of pathos."—I dwelt upon the parentless condition of these little wards of Society. And it was very affecting—my enemy wiped away a tear!Then I fed them up on chocolate and whipped cream and lemonade and tartar sandwiches, and sent them home, expansive and beaming, but without any appetite for dinner.I dwell thus at length upon our triumph, in order to create in you a happy frame of mind, before passing to the higeous calamity that so nearly wrecked the occasion."Now follows the dim horror of my tale,And I feel I'm growing gradually pale,For, even at this day,Though its smell has passed away,When I venture to remember it, I quail!"You never heard of our little Tammas Kehoe, did you? I simply haven't featured Tammas because he requires so much ink and time and vocabulary. He's a spirited lad, and he follows his dad, a mighty hunter of old—that sounds like more Bab Ballads, but it isn't; I made it up as I went along.We can't break Tammas of his inherited predatory instincts. He shoots the chickens with bows and arrows and lassoes the pigs and plays bull-fight with the cows—and oh, is very destructive! But his crowning villainy occurred an hour before the trustees' meeting, when we wanted to be so clean and sweet and engaging.It seems that he had stolen the rat trap from the oat bin, and had set it up in the wood lot, and yesterday morning was so fortunate as to catch a fine big skunk.Singapore was the first to report the discovery. He returned to the house and rolled on the rugs in a frenzy of remorse over his part of the business. While our attention was occupied with Sing, Tammas was busily skinning his prey in the seclusion of the woodshed. He buttoned the pelt inside his jacket, conveyed it by a devious route through the length of this building, and concealed it under his bed where he thought it wouldn't be found.Then he went—per schedule—to the basement to help freeze the ice-cream for our guests. You notice that we omitted ice-cream from the menu.In the short time that remained we created all the counter-irritation that was possible. Noah (negro furnace man) started smudge fires at intervals about the grounds. Cook waved a shovelful of burning coffee through the house. Betsy sprinkled the corridors with ammonia. Miss Snaith daintily treated the rugs with violet water. I sent an emergency call to the doctor who came and mixed a gigantic solution of chlorid of lime. But still, above and beneath and through every other odor, the unlaid ghost of Tammas's victim cried for vengeance.The first business that came up at the meeting, was whether we should dig a hole and bury, not only Tammas, but the whole main building. You can see with what finesse I carried off the shocking event, when I tell you that the Hon. Cy went home chuckling over a funny story, instead of grumbling at the new superintendent's inability to manage boys.We've our ain bit weird to dree!As ever,S. McBRIDE.THE JOHN GRIER HOME,Friday, likewise Saturday.Dear Judy:Singapore is still living in the carriage house, and receiving a daily carbolic-scented bath from Tammas Kehoe. I am hoping that some day, in the distant future, my darling will be fit to return.You will be pleased to hear that I have instituted a new method of spending your money. We are henceforth to buy a part of our shoes and drygoods and drug store comestibles from local shops, at not quite such low prices as the wholesale jobbers give, but still at a discount, and the education that is being thrown in is worth the difference. The reason is this: I have made the discovery that half of my children know nothing of money or its purchasing power. They think that shoes and corn meal and red-flannel petticoats and mutton stew and gingham shirts just float down from the blue sky.Last week I dropped a new green dollar bill out of my purse, and an eight-year-old urchin picked it up and asked if he could keep that picture of a bird. (American eagle in the center.) That child had never seen a bill in his life! I began an investigation, and discovered that dozens of children in this asylum have never bought anything or have ever seen anybody buy anything. And we are planning to turn them out at sixteen into a world governed entirely by the purchasing power of dollars and cents! Good heavens! just think of it! They are not to lead sheltered lives with somebody eternally looking after them; they have got to know how to get the very most they can out of every penny they can manage to earn.I pondered the question all one night, at intervals, and went to the village at nine o'clock the next morning. I held conferences with seven storekeepers; found four open-minded and helpful, two doubtful, and one actively stupid. I have started with the four—drygoods, groceries, shoes, and stationery. In return for somewhat large orders from us, they are to turn themselves and their clerks into teachers for my children, who are to go to the stores, inspect the stocks, and do their own purchasing with real money.For example, Jane needs a spool of blue sewing-silk and a yard of elastic; so two little girls, intrusted with a silver quarter, trot hand in hand to Mr. Meeker's. They match the silk with anxious care, and watch the clerk jealously while he measures the elastic, to make sure that he doesn't stretch it. Then they bring back six cents change, receive my thanks and praise, and retire to the ranks tingling with a sense of achievement.Isn't it pathetic? Ordinary children of ten or twelve automatically know so many things that our little incubator chicks have never dreamed of. But I have a variety of plans on foot. Just give me time, and you will see. One of these days I'll be turning out some nearly normal youngsters.LATER.I've an empty evening ahead, so I'll settle to some further gossip with you.You remember the peanuts that Gordon Hallock sent? Well, I was so gracious when I thanked him that it incited him to fresh effort. He apparently went into a toy shop, and placed himself unreservedly in the hands of an enterprising clerk. Yesterday two husky expressmen deposited in our front hall a crate full of expensive furry animals built to be consumed by the children of the rich. They are not exactly what I should have purchased had I been the one to disburse such a fortune, but my babies find them very huggable. The chicks are now taking to bed with them lions and elephants and bears and giraffes. I don't know what the psychological effect will be. Do you suppose when they grow up they will all join the circus?Oh, dear me, here is Miss Snaith, coming to pay a social call.Good-by.S.P.S. The prodigal has returned. He sends his respectful regards, and three wags of the tail.THE JOHN GRIER HOME,April 7. My dear Judy:I have just been reading a pamphlet on manual training for girls, and another on the proper diet for institutions—right proportions of proteins, fats, starches, etc. In these days of scientific charity, when every problem has been tabulated, you can run an institution by chart. I don't see how Mrs. Lippett could have made all the mistakes she did, assuming, of course,that she knew how to read. But there is one quite important branch of institutional work that has not been touched upon, and I myself am gathering data. Some day I shall issue a pamphlet on the "Management and Control of Trustees."I must tell you the joke about my enemy—not the Hon. Cy, but my first, my original enemy. He has undertaken a new field of endeavor. He says quite soberly (everything he does is sober; he has never smiled yet) that he has been watching me closely since my arrival, and though I am untrained and foolish and flippant (sic), he doesn't think that I am really so superficial as I at first appeared. I have an almost masculine ability of grasping the whole of a question and going straight to the point.Aren't men funny? When they want to pay you the greatest compliment in their power, they naively tell you that you have a masculine mind. There is one compliment, incidentally, that I shall never be paying him. I cannot honestly say that he has a quickness of perception almost feminine.So, though Sandy quite plainly sees my faults, still, he thinks that some of them may be corrected; and he has determined to carry on my education from the point where the college dropped it. A person in my position ought to be well read in physiology, biology, psychology, sociology, and eugenics; she should know the hereditary effects of insanity, idiocy, and alcohol; should be able to administer the Binet test; and should understand the nervous system of a frog. In pursuance whereof, he has placed at my disposal his own scientific library of four thousand volumes. He not only fetches in the books he wants me to read, but comes and asks questions to make sure I haven't skipped.We devoted last week to the life and letters of the Jukes family. Margaret, the mother of criminals, six generations ago, founded a prolific line, and her progeny, mostly in jail, now numbers some twelve hundred. Moral: watch the children with a bad heredity so carefully that none of them can ever have any excuse for growing up into Jukeses.So now, as soon as we have finished our tea, Sandy and I get out the Doomsday Book, and pore over its pages in an anxious search for alcoholic parents. It's a cheerful little game to while away the twilight hour after the day's work is done.QUELLE VIE! Come home fast and take me out of it. I'm wearying for the sight of you.SALLIE. J. G. H.,Thursday morning. My dear Pendleton Family:I have received your letter, and I seize my pen to stop you. I don't wish to be relieved. I take it back. I change my mind. The person you are planning to send sounds like an exact twin of Miss Snaith. How can you ask me to turn over my darling children to a kind, but ineffectual, middle-aged lady without any chin? The very thought of it wrings a mother's heart.Do you imagine that such a woman can carry on this work even temporarily? No! The manager of an institution like this has got to be young and husky and energetic and forceful and efficient and red-haired and sweet-tempered, like me. Of course I've been discontented,—anybody would be with things in such a mess,—but it's what you socialists call a holy discontent. And do you think that I am going to abandon all of the beautiful reforms I have so painstakingly started? No! I am not to be moved from this spot until you find a superintendent superior to Sallie McBride.That does not mean, though, that I am mortgaging myself forever. Just for the present, until things get on their feet. While the face washing, airing, reconstructing period lasts, I honestly believe you chose the right person when you hit upon me. I LOVE to plan improvements and order people about.This is an awfully messy letter, but I'm dashing it off in three minutes in order to catch you before you definitely engage that pleasant, inefficient middle-aged person without a chin.Please, kind lady and gentleman, don't do me out of me job! Let me stay a few months longer. Just gimme a chance to show what I'm good for, and I promise you won't never regret it.S. McB.J. G. H.,Thursday afternoon.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.THE JOHN GRIER HOME,Sunday.Dear Gordon:I know that I haven't written lately; you have a perfect right to grumble, but oh dear! oh dear! you can't imagine what a busy person an orphan asylum superintendent is. And all the writing energy I possess has to be expended upon that voracious Judy Abbott Pendleton. If three days go by without a letter she telegraphs to know if the asylum has burned; whereas, if you—nice man—go letterless, you simply send us a present to remind us of your existence. So, you see, it's distinctly to our advantage to slight you often.You will probably be annoyed when I tell you that I have promised to stay on here. They finally did find a woman to take my place, but she wasn't at all the right type and would have answered only temporarily. And, my dear Gordon, it's true, when I faced saying good-by to this feverish planning and activity, Worcester somehow looked rather colorless. I couldn't bear to let my asylum go unless I was sure of substituting a life packed equally full of sensation.I know the alternative you will suggest, but please don't—just now. I told you before that I must have a few months longer to make up my mind. And in the meantime I like the feeling that I'm of use in the world. There's something constructive and optimistic about working with children; that is, if you look at it from my cheerful point of view, and not from our Scotch doctor's. I've never seen anybody like that man; he's always pessimistic and morbid and down. It's best not to be too intelligent about insanity and dipsomania and all the other hereditary details. I am just about ignorant enough to be light-hearted and effective in a place like this.The thought of all of these little lives expanding in every direction eternally thrills me. There are so many possibilities in our child garden for every kind of flower. It has been planted rather promiscuously, to be sure, but though we undoubtedly shall gather a number of weeds, we are also hoping for some rare and beautiful blossoms. Am I not growing sentimental? It is due to hunger—and there goes the dinner-gong! We are going to have a delicious meal: roast beef and creamed carrots and beet greens, with rhubarb pie for dessert. Would you not like to dine with me? I should love to have you.Most cordially yours,S. McB.P.S. You should see the number of poor homeless cats that these children want to adopt. We had four when I came, and they have all had kittens since. I haven't taken an exact census, but I think the institution possesses nineteen.April 15. My dear Judy:You'd like to make another slight donation to the J. G. H. out of the excess of last month's allowance? BENE! Will you kindly have the following inserted in all low-class metropolitan dailies:Notice!To Parents Planning to Abandon their Children:Please do it before they have reached their third year.I can't think of any action on the part of abandoning parents that would help us more effectually. This having to root up evil before you begin planting good is slow, discouraging work.We have one child here who has almost floored me; but I WILL NOT acknowledge myself beaten by a child of five. He alternates between sullen moroseness, when he won't speak a word, and the most violent outbursts of temper, when he smashes everything within reach. He has been here only three months, and in that time he has destroyed nearly every piece of bric-a-brac in the institution—not, by the way, a great loss to art.A month or so before I came he pulled the tablecloth from the officers' table while the girl in charge was in the corridor sounding the gong. The soup had already been served. You can imagine the mess! Mrs. Lippett half killed the child on that occasion, but the killing did nothing to lessen the temper, which was handed on to me intact.His father was Italian and his mother Irish; he has red hair and freckles from County Cork and the most beautiful brown eyes that ever came out of Naples. After the father was stabbed in a fight and the mother had died of alcoholism, the poor little chap by some chance or other got to us. I suspect that he belongs in the Catholic Protectory. As for his manners—oh dear! oh dear! They are what you would expect. He kicks and bites and swears. I have dubbed him Punch.Yesterday he was brought squirming and howling to my office, charged with having knocked down a little girl and robbed her of her doll. Miss Snaith plumped him into a chair behind me, and left him to grow quiet, while I went on with my writing. I was suddenly startled by an awful crash. He had pushed that big green jardiniere off the window-sill and broken it into five hundred pieces. I jumped with a suddenness that swept the ink-bottle to the floor, and when Punch saw that second catastrophe, he stopped roaring with rage and threw back his head and roared with laughter. The child is DIABOLICAL.I have determined to try a new method of discipline that I don't believe in the whole of his forlorn little life he has ever experienced. I am going to see what praise and encouragement and love will do. So, instead of scolding him about the jardiniere, I assumed that it was an accident. I kissed him and told him not to feel bad; that I didn't mind in the least. It shocked him into being quiet; he simply held his breath and stared while I wiped away his tears and sopped up the ink.The child just now is the biggest problem that the J. G. H. affords. He needs the most patient, loving, individual care—a proper mother and father, likewise some brothers and sisters and a grandmother. But I can't place him in a respectable family until I make over his language and his propensity to break things. I separated him from the other children, and kept him in my room all the morning, Jane having removed to safe heights all destructible OBJETS D'ART. Fortunately, he loves to draw, and he sat on a rug for two hours, and occupied himself with colored pencils. He was so surprised when I showed an interest in a red-and-green ferryboat, with a yellow flag floating from the mast, that he became quite profanely affable. Until then I couldn't get a word out of him.In the afternoon Dr. MacRae dropped in and admired the ferryboat, while Punch swelled with the pride of creation. Then, as a reward for being such a good little boy, the doctor took him out in his automobile on a visit to a country patient.Punch was restored to the fold at five o'clock by a sadder and wiser doctor. At a sedate country estate he had stoned the chickens, smashed a cold frame, and swung the pet Angora cat by its tail. Then when the sweet old lady tried to make him be kind to poor pussy, he told her to go to hell.I can't bear to consider what some of these children have seen and experienced. It will take years of sunshine and happiness and love to eradicate the dreadful memories that they have stored up in the far-back corners of their little brains. And there are so many children and so few of us that we can't hug them enough; we simply haven't arms or laps to go around.MAIS PARLONS D'AUTRES CHOSES! Those awful questions of heredity and environment that the doctor broods over so constantly are getting into my blood, too; and it's a vicious habit. If a person is to be of any use in a place like this, she must see nothing but good in the world. Optimism is the only wear for a social worker."'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock"—do you know where that beautiful line of poetry comes from? "Cristabel," of English K. Mercy! how I hated that course! You, being an English shark, liked it; but I never understood a word that was said from the time I entered the classroom till I left it. However, the remark with which I opened this paragraph is true. It IS the middle of night by the mantelpiece clock, so I'll wish you pleasant dreams. ADDIO!SALLIE.Tuesday.Dear Enemy:You doctored the whole house, then stalked past my library with your nose in the air, while I was waiting tea with a plate of Scotch scones sitting on the trivet, ordered expressly for you as a peace-offering.If you are really hurt, I will read the Kallikak book; but I must tell you that you are working me to death. It takes almost all of my energy to be an effective superintendent, and this university extension course that you are conducting I find wearing. You remember how indignant you were one day last week because I confessed to having stayed up until one o'clock the night before? Well, my dear man, if I were to accomplish all the vicarious reading you require, I should sit up until morning every night.However, bring it in. I usually manage half an hour of recreation after dinner, and though I had wanted to glance at Wells's latest novel, I will amuse myself instead with your feeble-minded family.Life of late is unco steep. Obligingly yours,S. McB.THE JOHN GRIER HOME,April 17.Dear Gordon:Thank you for the tulips, likewise the lilies of the valley. They are most becoming to my blue Persian bowls.Have you ever heard of the Kallikaks? Get the book and read them up. They are a two-branch family in New Jersey, I think, though their real name and origin is artfully concealed. But, anyway,—and this is true,—six generations ago a young gentleman, called for convenience Martin Kallikak, got drunk one night and temporarily eloped with a feeble-minded barmaid, thus founding a long line of feeble-minded Kallikaks,—drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes, horse thieves,—a scourge to New Jersey and surrounding States.Martin later straightened up, married a normal woman, and founded a second line of proper Kallikaks,—judges, doctors, farmers, professors, politicians,—a credit to their country. And there the two branches still are, flourishing side by side. You can see what a blessing it would have been to New Jersey if something drastic had happened to that feeble-minded barmaid in her infancy.It seems that feeblemindedness is a very hereditary quality, and science isn't able to overcome it. No operation has been discovered for introducing brains into the head of a child who didn't start with them. And the child grows up with, say, a nine-year brain in a thirty-year body, and becomes an easy tool for any criminal he meets. Our prisons are one-third full of feeble-minded convicts. Society ought to segregate them on feeble-minded farms, where they can earn their livings in peaceful menial pursuits, and not have children. Then in a generation or so we might be able to wipe them out.Did you know all that? It's very necessary information for a politician to have. Get the book and read it, please; I'd send my copy only that it's borrowed.It's also very necessary information for me to have. There are eleven of these chicks that I suspect a bit, and I am SURE of Loretta Higgins. I have been trying for a month to introduce one or two basic ideas into that child's brain, and now I know what the trouble is: her head is filled with a sort of soft cheesy substance instead of brain.I came up here to make over this asylum in such little details as fresh air and food and clothes and sunshine, but, heavens! you can see what problems I am facing. I've got to make over society first, so that it won't send me sub-normal children to work with. Excuse all this excited conversation; but I've just met up with the subject of feeble-mindedness, and it's appalling—and interesting. It is your business as a legislator to make laws that will remove it from the world. Please attend to this immediately, And oblige,S. McBRIDE,Sup't John Grier Home.Friday.Dear Man of Science:You didn't come today. Please don't skip us tomorrow. I have finished the Kallikak family and I am bursting with talk. Don't you think we ought to have a psychologist examine these children?We owe it to adopting parents not to saddle them with feeble-minded offspring.You know, I'm tempted to ask you to prescribe arsenic for Loretta's cold. I've diagnosed her case; she's a Kallikak. Is it right to let her grow up and found a line of 378 feeble-minded people for society to care for? Oh dear! I do hate to poison the child, but what can I do?S. McB.Dear Gordon:You aren't interested in feeble-minded people, and you are shocked because I am? Well, I am equally shocked because you are not. If you aren't interested in everything of the sort that there unfortunately is in this world, how can you make wise laws?You can't.However, at your request, I will converse upon a less morbid subject. I've just bought fifty yards of blue and rose and green and corn-colored hair-ribbon as an Easter present for my fifty little daughters. I am also thinking of sending you an Easter present. How would a nice fluffy little kitten please you? I can offer any of the following patterns:—Number 3 comes in any color, gray, black, or yellow. If you will let me know which you would rather have, I will express it at once.I would write a respectable letter, but it's teatime, and I see that a guest approaches.ADDIO! SALLIE.P.S. Don't you know some one who would like to adopt a desirable baby boy with seventeen nice new teeth?April 20. My dear Judy:One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns! We've had a Good Friday present of ten dozen, given by Mrs. De Peyster Lambert, a high church, stained-glass-window soul whom I met at a tea a few days ago. (Who says now that teas are a silly waste of time?) She asked me about my "precious little waifs," and said I was doing a noble work and would be rewarded. I saw buns in her eye, and sat down and talked to her for half an hour.Now I shall go and thank her in person, and tell her with a great deal of affecting detail how much those buns were appreciated by my precious little waifs—omitting the account of how precious little Punch threw his bun at Miss Snaith and plastered her neatly in the eye. I think, with encouragement, Mrs. De Peyster Lambert can be developed into a cheerful giver.Oh, I'm growing into the most shocking beggar! My family don't dare to visit me, because I demand BAKSHISH in such a brazen manner. I threatened to remove father from my calling list unless he shipped immediately sixty-five pairs of overalls for my prospective gardeners. A notice from the freight office this morning asks me to remove two packing cases consigned to them by the J. L. McBride Co. of Worcester; so I take it that father desires to continue my acquaintance. Jimmie hasn't sent us anything yet, and he's getting a huge salary. I write him frequently a pathetic list of our needs.But Gordon Hallock has learned the way to a mother's heart. I was so pleasant about the peanuts and menagerie that now he sends a present of some sort every few days, and I spend my entire time composing thank-you letters that aren't exact copies of the ones I've sent before. Last week we received a dozen big scarlet balls. The nursery is FULL of them; you kick them before you as you walk. And yesterday there arrived a half-bushel of frogs and ducks and fishes to float in the bathtubs.Send, O best of trustees, the tubs in which to float them!I am, as usual,S. McBRIDE.Tuesday. My dear Judy:Spring must be lurking about somewhere; the birds are arriving from the South. Isn't it time you followed their example?Society note from the BIRD O' PASSAGE NEWS:"Mr. and Mrs. First Robin have returned from a trip to Florida. It is hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Jervis Pendleton will arrive shortly."Even up here in our dilatory Dutchess County the breeze smells green. It makes you want to be out and away, roaming the hills, or else down on your knees grubbing in the dirt. Isn't it funny what farmering instincts the budding spring awakens in even the most urban souls?I have spent the morning making plans for little private gardens for every child over nine. The big potato field is doomed. That is the only feasible spot for sixty-two private gardens. It is near enough to be watched from the north windows, and yet far enough away, so that their messing will not injure our highly prized landscape lawn. Also the earth is rich, and they have some chance of success. I don't want the poor little chicks to scratch all summer, and then not turn up any treasure in the end. In order to furnish an incentive, I shall announce that the institution will buy their produce and pay in real money, though I foresee we shall be buried under a mountain of radishes.I do so want to develop self-reliance and initiative in these children, two sturdy qualities in which they are conspicuously lacking (with the exception of Sadie Kate and a few other bad ones). Children who have spirit enough to be bad I consider very hopeful. It's those who are good just from inertia that are discouraging.The last few days have been spent mainly in charming the devil out of Punch, an interesting task if I could devote my whole time to it. But with one hundred and seven other little devils to charm away, my attention is sorely deflected.The awful thing about this life is that whatever I am doing, the other things that I am not doing, but ought to be, keep tugging at my skirts. There is no doubt but Punch's personal devil needs the whole attention of a whole person,—preferably two persons,—so that they could spell each other and get some rest.Sadie Kate has just flown in from the nursery with news of a scarlet goldfish (Gordon's gift) swallowed by one of our babies. Mercy! the number of calamities that can occur in an orphan asylum!9 P.M.My children are in bed, and I've just had a thought. Wouldn't it be heavenly if the hibernating system prevailed among the human young? There would be some pleasure in running an asylum if one could just tuck the little darlings into bed the first of October and keep them there until the twenty-second of April.I'm yours, as ever,SALLIE.April 24.Dear Jervis Pendleton, Esq.:This is to supplement a night telegram which I sent you ten minutes ago. Fifty words not being enough to convey any idea of my emotions, I herewith add a thousand.As you will know by the time you receive this, I have discharged the farmer, and he has refused to be discharged. Being twice the size of me, I can't lug him to the gate and chuck him out. He wants a notification from the president of the board of trustees written in vigorous language on official paper in typewriting. So, dear president of the board of trustees, kindly supply all of this at your earliest convenience.Here follows the history of the case:The winter season still being with us when I arrived and farming activities at a low ebb, I have heretofore paid little attention to Robert Sterry except to note on two occasions that his pigpens needed cleaning; but today I sent for him to come and consult with me in regard to spring planting.Sterry came, as requested, and seated himself at ease in my office with his hat upon his head. I suggested as tactfully as might be that he remove it, an entirely necessary request, as little orphan boys were in and out on errands, and "hats off in the house" is our first rule in masculine deportment.Sterry complied with my request, and stiffened himself to be against whatever I might desire.I proceeded to the subject in hand, namely, that the diet of the John Grier Home in the year to come is to consist less exclusively of potatoes. At which our farmer grunted in the manner of the Hon. Cyrus Wykoff, only it was a less ethereal and gentlemanly grunt than a trustee permits himself. I enumerated corn and beans and onions and peas and tomatoes and beets and carrots and turnips as desirable substitutes.Sterry observed that if potatoes and cabbages was good enough for him, he guessed they was good enough for charity children.I proceeded imperturbably to say that the two-acre potato field was to be plowed and fertilized, and laid out into sixty individual gardens, the boys assisting in the work.At that Sterry exploded. The two-acre field was the most fertile and valuable piece of earth on the whole place. He guessed if I was to break that up into play gardens for the children to mess about in, I'd be hearing about it pretty danged quick from the board of trustees. That field was fitted for potatoes, it had always raised potatoes, and it was going to continue to raise them just as long as he had anything to say about it."You have nothing whatever to say about it," I amiably replied. "I have decided that the two-acre field is the best plot to use for the children's gardens, and you and the potatoes will have to give way."Whereupon he rose in a storm of bucolic wrath, and said he'd be gol darned if he'd have a lot of these danged city brats interfering with his work.I explained—very calmly for a red-haired person with Irish forebears—that this place was run for the exclusive benefit of these children; that the children were not here to be exploited for the benefit of the place, a philosophy which he did not grasp, though my fancy city language had a slightly dampening effect. I added that what I required in a farmer was the ability and patience to instruct the boys in gardening and simple outdoor work; that I wished a man of large sympathies whose example would be an inspiring influence to these children of the city streets.Sterry, pacing about like a caged woodchuck, launched into a tirade about silly Sunday-school notions, and, by a transition which I did not grasp, passed to a review of the general subject of woman's suffrage. I gathered that he is not in favor of the movement. I let him argue himself quiet, then I handed him a check for his wages, and told him to vacate the tenant house by twelve o'clock next Wednesday.Sterry says he'll be danged if he will. (Excuse so many DANGEDS. It is the creature's only adjective.) He was engaged to work for this institution by the president of the board of trustees, and he will not move from that house until the president of the board of trustees tells him to go. I don't think poor Sterry realizes that since his arrival a new president has come to the throne.ALORS you have the story. I make no threats, but Sterry or McBride—take your choice, dear sir.I am also about to write to the head of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, at Amherst, asking him to recommend a good, practical man with a nice, efficient, cheerful wife, who will take the entire care of our modest domain of seventeen acres, and who will be a man with the right personality to place over our boys.If we get the farming end of this institution into running shape, it ought to furnish not only beans and onions for the table, but education for our hands and brains.I remain, sir, Yours most truly, S. McBRIDE, Superintendent of the John Grier Home.P.S. I think that Sterry will probably come back some night and throw rocks through the windows. Shall I have them insured?My dear Enemy:You disappeared so quickly this afternoon that I had no chance to thank you, but the echoes of that discharge penetrated as far as my library. Also, I have viewed the debris. What on earth did you do to poor Sterry? Watching the purposeful set of your shoulders as you strode toward the carriage house, I was filled with sudden compunction. I did not want the man murdered, merely reasoned with. I am afraid you were a little harsh.However, your technic seems to have been effective. Report says that he has telephoned for a moving wagon and that Mrs. Sterry is even now on her hands and knees ripping up the parlor carpet.For this relief much thanks.SALLIE McBRIDE.April 26.Dear Jervis:Your vigorous telegram was, after all, not needed. Dr. Robin MacRae, who is a grand PAWKY mon when it comes to a fight, accomplished the business with beautiful directness. I was so bubbling with rage that immediately after writing to you I called up the doctor on the telephone, and rehearsed the whole business over again. Now, our Sandy, whatever his failings (and he has them), does have an uncommon supply of common sense. He knows how useful those gardens are going to be, and how worse than useless Sterry was. Also says he, "The superintendent's authority must be upheld." (That, incidentally, is beautiful, coming from him.) But anyway, those were his words. And he hung up the receiver, cranked up his car, and flew up here at lawless speed. He marched straight to Sterry, impelled by a fine Scotch rage, and he discharged the man with such vigor and precision, that the carriage house window was shattered to fragments.Since this morning at eleven, when Sterry's wagonload of furniture rumbled out of the gates, a sweet peace has reigned over the J. G. H. A man from the village is helping us out while we hopefully await the farmer of our dreams.I am sorry to have troubled you with our troubles. Tell Judy that she owes me a letter, and won't hear from me until she has paid it. Your ob'd't servant,S. McBRIDE.Dear Judy:In my letter of yesterday to Jervis I forgotted (Punch's word) to convey to you our thanks for three tin bathtubs. The skyblue tub with poppies on the side adds a particularly bright note to the nursery. I do love presents for the babies that are too big to be swallowed.You will be pleased to hear that our manual training is well under way. The carpenter benches are being installed in the old primary room, and until our schoolhouse gets its new addition, our primary class is meeting on the front porch, in accordance with Miss Matthew's able suggestion.The girls' sewing classes are also in progress. A circle of benches under the copper beech tree accommodates the hand sewers, while the big girls take turns at our three machines. Just as soon as they gain some proficiency we will begin the glorious work of redressing the institution. I know you think I'm slow, but it's really a task to accomplish one hundred and eighty new frocks. And the girls will appreciate them so much more if they do the work themselves.I may also report that our hygiene system has risen to a high level. Dr. MacRae has introduced morning and evening exercises, and a glass of milk and a game of tag in the middle of school hours. He has instituted a physiology class, and has separated the children into small groups, so that they may come to his house, where he has a manikin that comes apart and shows all its messy insides. They can now rattle off scientific truths about their little digestions as fluently as Mother Goose rhymes. We are really becoming too intelligent for recognition. You would never guess that we were orphans to hear us talk; we are quite like Boston children.2 P.M.O Judy, such a calamity! Do you remember several weeks ago I told you about placing out a nice little girl in a nice family home where I hoped she would be adopted? It was a kind Christian family living in a pleasant country village, the foster-father a deacon in the church. Hattie was a sweet, obedient, housewifely little body, and it looked as though we had exactly fitted them to each other. My dear, she was returned this morning for STEALING. Scandal piled on scandal: SHE HAD STOLEN A COMMUNION CUP FROM CHURCH!Between her sobs and their accusations it took me half an hour to gather the truth. It seems that the church they attend is very modern and hygienic, like our doctor, and has introduced individual communion cups. Poor little Hattie had never heard of communion in her life. In fact, she wasn't very used to church, Sunday-school having always sufficed for her simple religious needs. But in her new home she attended both, and one day, to her pleased surprise, they served refreshments. But they skipped her. She made no comment, however; she is used to being skipped.But as they were starting home she saw that the little silver cup had been casually left in the seat, and supposing that it was a souvenir that you could take if you wished, she put it into her pocket.It came to light two days later as the most treasured ornament of her doll's-house. It seems that Hattie long ago saw a set of doll's dishes in a toy shop window, and has ever since dreamed of possessing a set of her own. The communion cup was not quite the same, but it answered. Now, if our family had only had a little less religion and a little more sense, they would have returned the cup, perfectly unharmed, and have marched Hattie to the nearest toy shop and bought her some dishes. But instead, they bundled the child and her belongings into the first train they could catch, and shoved her in at our front door, proclaiming loudly that she was a thief.I am pleased to say that I gave that indignant deacon and his wife such a thorough scolding as I am sure they have never listened to from the pulpit. I borrowed some vigorous bits from Sandy's vocabulary, and sent them home quite humbled. As for poor little Hattie, here she is back again, after going out with such high hopes. It has an awfully bad moral effect on a child to be returned to the asylum in disgrace, especially when she wasn't aware of committing a crime. It gives her a feeling that the world is full of unknown pitfalls, and makes her afraid to take a step. I must bend all my energies now toward finding another set of parents for her, and ones that haven't grown so old and settled and good that they have entirely forgotten their own childhood.Sunday.I forgot to tell you that our new farmer is here, Turnfelt by name; and his wife is a love, yellow hair and dimples. If she were an orphan, I could place her in a minute. We can't let her go to waste. I have a beautiful plan of building an addition to the farmer's cottage, and establishing under her comfortable care a sort of brooding-house where we can place our new little chicks, to make sure they haven't anything contagious and to eliminate as much profanity as possible before turning them loose among our other perfect chicks.How does that strike you? It is very necessary in an institution as full of noise and movement and stir as this to have some isolated spot where we can put cases needing individual attention. Some of our children have inherited nerves, and a period of quiet contemplation is indicated. Isn't my vocabulary professional and scientific? Daily intercourse with Dr. Robin MacRae is extremely educational.Since Turnfelt came, you should see our pigs. They are so clean and pink and unnatural that they don't recognize one another any more as they pass.Our potato field is also unrecognizable. It has been divided with string and pegs into as many squares as a checker-board, and every child has staked out a claim. Seed catalogues form our only reading matter.
Her defense consisted in hysterical assertions that she loved the children, and had done her duty as she saw it. She did not believe in giving medicine to babies; she thought drugs bad for their poor little stomachs. You can imagine Sandy! Oh, dear! oh, dear! To think I missed it!
Well, the tempest raged for three days, and Sadie Kate nearly ran her little legs off carrying peppery messages back and forth between us and the doctor. It is only under stress that I communicate with him by telephone, as he has an interfering old termagant of a housekeeper who "listens in" on the down-stairs switch. I don't wish the scandalous secrets of the John Grier spread abroad. The doctor demanded Miss Snaith's instant dismissal, and I refused. Of course she is a vague, unfocused, inefficient old thing, but she does love the children, and with proper supervision is fairly useful.
At least, in the light of her exalted family connections, I can't pack her off in disgrace like a drunken cook. I am hoping in time to eliminate her by a process of delicate suggestion; perhaps I can make her feel that her health requires a winter in California. And also, no matter what the doctor wants, so positive and dictatorial is his manner that just out of self-respect one must take the other side. When he states that the world is round, I instantly assert it to be triangular.
Finally, after three pleasantly exhilarating days, the whole business settled itself. An apology (a very dilute one) was extracted from him for being so unkind to the poor lady, and full confession, with promises for the future, was drawn from her. It seems that she couldn't bear to make the little dears take the stuff, but, for obvious reasons, she couldn't bear to cross Dr. MacRae, so she hid the last fourteen bottles in a dark corner of the cellar. Just how she was planning to dispose of her loot I don't know. Can you pawn cod-liver oil?
LATER.
Peace negotiations had just ended this afternoon, and Sandy had made a dignified exit, when the Hon. Cyrus Wykoff was announced. Two enemies in the course of an hour are really too much!
The Hon. Cy was awfully impressed with the new dining room, especially when he heard that Betsy had put on those rabbits with her own lily-white hands. Stenciling rabbits on walls, he allows, is a fitting pursuit for a woman, but an executive position like mine is a trifle out of her sphere. He thinks it would be far wiser if Mr. Pendleton did not give me such free scope in the spending of his money.
While we were still contemplating Betsy's mural flight, an awful crash came from the pantry, and we found Gladiola Murphy weeping among the ruins of five yellow plates. It is sufficiently shattering to my nerves to hear these crashes when I am alone, but it is peculiarly shattering when receiving a call from an unsympathetic trustee.
I shall cherish that set of dishes to the best of my ability, but if you wish to see your gift in all its uncracked beauty, I should advise you to hurry North, and visit the John Grier Home without delay.
Yours as ever,
SALLIE.
March 26. My dear Judy:
I have just been holding an interview with a woman who wants to take a baby home to surprise her husband. I had a hard time convincing her that, since he is to support the child, it might be a delicate attention to consult him about its adoption. She argued stubbornly that it was none of his business, seeing that the onerous work of washing and dressing and training would fall upon her. I am really beginning to feel sorry for men. Some of them seem to have very few rights.
Even our pugnacious doctor I suspect of being a victim of domestic tyranny, and his housekeeper's at that. It is scandalous the way Maggie McGurk neglects the poor man. I have had to put him in charge of an orphan. Sadie Kate, with a very housewifely air, is this moment sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug sewing buttons on his overcoat while he is upstairs tending babies.
You would never believe it, but Sandy and I are growing quite confidential in a dour Scotch fashion. It has become his habit, when homeward bound after his professional calls, to chug up to our door about four in the afternoon, and make the rounds of the house to make sure that we are not developing cholera morbus or infanticide or anything catching, and then present himself at four-thirty at my library door to talk over our mutual problems.
Does he come to see me? Oh, no, indeed; he comes to get tea and toast and marmalade. The man hath a lean and hungry look. His housekeeper doesn't feed him enough. As soon as I get the upper hand of him a little more, I am going to urge him on to revolt.
Meanwhile he is very grateful for something to eat, but oh, so funny in his attempts at social grace! At first he would hold a cup of tea in one hand, a plate of muffins in the other, and then search blankly for a third hand to eat them with. Now he has solved the problem. He turns in his toes and brings his knees together; then he folds his napkin into a long, narrow wedge that fills the crack between them, thus forming a very workable pseudo lap; after that he sits with tense muscles until the tea is drunk. I suppose I ought to provide a table, but the spectacle of Sandy with his toes turned in is the one gleam of amusement that my day affords.
The postman is just driving in with, I trust, a letter from you. Letters make a very interesting break in the monotony of asylum life. If you wish to keep this superintendent contented, you'd better write often.
. . . . . . . .
Mail received and contents noted.
Kindly convey my thanks to Jervis for three alligators in a swamp. He shows rare artistic taste in the selection of his post cards. Your seven-page illustrated letter from Miami arrives at the same time. I should have known Jervis from the palm tree perfectly, even without the label, as the tree has so much the more hair of the two. Also, I have a polite bread-and-butter letter from my nice young man in Washington, and a book from him, likewise a box of candy. The bag of peanuts for the kiddies he has shipped by express. Did you ever know such assiduity?
Jimmie favors me with the news that he is coming to visit me as soon as father can spare him from the factory. The poor boy does hate that factory so! It isn't that he is lazy; he just simply isn't interested in overalls. But father can't understand such a lack of taste. Having built up the factory, he of course has developed a passion for overalls, which should have been inherited by his eldest son. I find it awfully convenient to have been born a daughter; I am not asked to like overalls, but am left free to follow any morbid career I may choose, such as this.
To return to my mail: There arrives an advertisement from a wholesale grocer, saying that he has exceptionally economical brands of oatmeal, rice, flour, prunes, and dried apples that he packs specially for prisons and charitable institutions. Sounds nutritious, doesn't it?
I also have letters from a couple of farmers, each of whom would like to have a strong, husky boy of fourteen who is not afraid of work, their object being to give him a good home. These good homes appear with great frequency just as the spring planting is coming on. When we investigated one of them last week, the village minister, in answer to our usual question, "Does he own any property?" replied in a very guarded manner, "I think he must own a corkscrew."
You would hardly credit some of the homes that we have investigated. We found a very prosperous country family the other day, who lived huddled together in three rooms in order to keep the rest of their handsome house clean. The fourteen-year girl they wished to adopt, by way of a cheap servant, was to sleep in the same tiny room with their own three children. Their kitchen-dining-parlor apartment was more cluttered up and unaired than any city tenement I ever saw, and the thermometer at eighty-four. One could scarcely say they were living there; they were rather COOKING. You may be sure they got no girl from us!
I have made one invariable rule—every other is flexible. No child is to be placed out unless the proposed family can offer better advantages than we can give. I mean than we are going to be able to give in the course of a few months, when we get ourselves made over into a model institution. I shall have to confess that at present we are still pretty bad.
But anyway, I am very CHOOSEY in regard to homes, and I reject three-fourths of those that offer.
LATER.
Gordon has made honorable amends to my children. His bag of peanuts is here, made of burlap and three feet high.
Do you remember the dessert of peanuts and maple sugar they used to give us at college? We turned up our noses, but ate. I am instituting it here, and I assure you we don't turn up our noses. It is a pleasure to feed children who have graduated from a course of Mrs. Lippett; they are pathetically grateful for small blessings.
You can't complain that this letter is too short.
Yours,
On the verge of writer's cramp,
S. McB.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Off and on, all day Friday.
Dear Judy:
You will be interested to hear that I have encountered another enemy—the doctor's housekeeper. I had talked to the creature several times over the telephone, and had noted that her voice was not distinguished by the soft, low accents that mark the caste of "Vere de Vere"; but now I have seen her. This morning, while returning from the village, I made a slight detour, and passed our doctor's house. Sandy is evidently the result of environment—olive green, with a mansard roof and the shades pulled down. You would think he had just been holding a funeral.
I don't wonder that the amenities of life have somewhat escaped the poor man. After studying the outside of his house, I was filled with curiosity to see if the inside matched.
Having sneezed five times before breakfast this morning, I decided to go in and consult him professionally. To be sure, he is a children's specialist, but sneezes are common to all ages. So I boldly marched up the steps and rang the bell.
Hark! What sound is that that breaks upon our revelry? The Hon. Cy's voice, as I live, approaching up the stairs. I've letters to write, and I can't be tormented by his blether, so I am rushing Jane to the door with orders to look him firmly in the eye and tell him I am out.
. . . . . . . .
On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined. He's gone.
But those eight stars represent eight agonizing minutes spent in the dark of my library closet. The Hon. Cy received Jane's communication with the affable statement that he would sit down and wait. Whereupon he entered and sat. But did Jane leave me to languish in the closet? No; she enticed him to the nursery to see the AWFUL thing that Sadie Kate has done. The Hon. Cy loves to see awful things, particularly when done by Sadie Kate. I haven't an idea what scandal Jane is about to disclose; but no matter, he has gone.
Where was I? Oh, yes; I had rung the doctor's bell.
The door was opened by a large, husky person with her sleeves rolled up. She looked very businesslike, with a hawk's nose and cold gray eyes.
"Well?" said she, her tone implying that I was a vacuum-cleaning agent.
"Good morning." I smiled affably, and stepped inside. "Is this Mrs. McGurk?"
"It is," said she. "An' ye'll be the new young woman in the orphan asylum?"
"I am that," said I. "Is himself at home?"
"He is not," said she.
"But this is his office hour."
"He don't keep it regular'."
"He ought," said I, sternly. "Kindly tell him that Miss McBride called to consult him, and ask him to look in at the John Grier Home this afternoon."
"Ump'!" grunted Mrs. McGurk, and closed the door so promptly that she shut in the hem of my skirt.
When I told the doctor this afternoon, he shrugged his shoulders, and observed that that was Maggie's gracious way.
"And why do you put up with Maggie?" said I.
"And where would I find any one better?" said he. "Doing the work for a lone man who comes as irregularly to meals as a twenty-four-hour day will permit is no sinecure. She furnishes little sunshine in the home, but she does manage to produce a hot dinner at nine o'clock at night."
Just the same, I am willing to wager that her hot dinners are neither delicious nor well served. She's an inefficient, lazy old termagant, and I know why she doesn't like me. She imagines that I want to steal away the doctor and oust her from a comfortable position, something of a joke, considering. But I am not undeceiving her; it will do the old thing good to worry a little. She may cook him better dinners, and fatten him up a trifle. I understand that fat men are good-natured.
TEN O'CLOCK.
I don't know what silly stuff I have been writing to you off and on all day, between interruptions. It has got to be night at last, and I am too tired to do so much as hold up my head. Your song tells the sad truth, "There is no joy in life but sleep."
I bid you good night.
S. McB.
Isn't the English language absurd? Look at those forty monosyllables in a row!
J. G. H.,
April 1.
Dear Judy:
I have placed out Isador Gutschneider. His new mother is a Swedish woman, fat and smiling, with blue eyes and yellow hair. She chose him out of the whole nurseryful of children because he was the brunettest baby there. She has always loved brunettes, but in her most ambitious dreams has never hoped to have one of her own. His name is going to be changed to Oscar Carlson, after his new dead uncle.
My first trustees' meeting is to occur next Wednesday. I confess that I am not looking forward to it with impatience—especially as an inaugural address by me will be its chief feature. I wish our president were here to back me up! But at least I am sure of one thing. I am never going to adopt the Uriah Heepish attitude toward trustees that characterized Mrs. Lippett's manners. I shall treat "first Wednesdays" as a pleasant social diversion, my day at home, when the friends of the asylum gather for discussion and relaxation; and I shall endeavor not to let our pleasures discommode the orphans. You see how I have taken to heart the unhappy experiences of that little Jerusha.
Your last letter has arrived, and no suggestion in it of traveling North. Isn't it about time that you were turning your faces back toward Fifth Avenue? Hame is hame, be 't ever sae hamely. Don't you marvel at the Scotch that flows so readily from my pen? Since being acquent' wi' Sandy, I hae gathered a muckle new vocabulary. The dinner gong! I leave you, to devote a revivifying half-hour to mutton hash. We eat to live in the John Grier Home.
SIX O'CLOCK.
The Hon. Cy has been calling again. He drops in with great frequency, hoping to catch me IN DELICTU. How I do not like that man! He is a pink, fat, puffy old thing, with a pink, fat, puffy soul. I was in a very cheery, optimistic frame of mind before his arrival, but now I shall do nothing but grumble for the rest of the day.
He deplores all of the useless innovations that I am endeavoring to introduce, such as a cheerful playroom, prettier clothes, baths, and better food and fresh air and play and fun and ice-cream and kisses. He says that I will unfit these children to occupy the position in life that God has called them to occupy.
At that my Irish blood came to the surface, and I told him that if God had planned to make all of these 113 little children into useless, ignorant, unhappy citizens, I was going to fool God! That we weren't educating them out of their class in the least. We were educating them INTO their natural class much more effectually than is done in the average family. We weren't trying to force them into college if they hadn't any brains, as happens with rich men's sons; and we weren't putting them to work at fourteen if they were naturally ambitious, as happens with poor men's sons. We were watching them closely and individually and discovering their level. If our children showed an aptitude to become farm laborers and nurse-maids, we were going to teach them to be the best possible farm laborers and nurse-maids; and if they showed a tendency to become lawyers, we would turn them into honest, intelligent, open-minded lawyers. (He's a lawyer himself, but certainly not an open-minded one.)
He grunted when I had finished my remarks, and stirred his tea vigorously. Whereupon I suggested that perhaps he needed another lump of sugar, and dropped it in, and left him to absorb it.
The only way to deal with trustees is with a firm and steady hand. You have to keep them in their places.
Oh, my dear! that smudge in the corner was caused by Singapore's black tongue. He is trying to send you an affectionate kiss. Poor Sing thinks he's a lap dog—isn't it a tragedy when people mistake their vocations? I myself am not always certain that I was born an orphan asylum superintendent.
Yours, til deth,
S. McB.
SUPERINTENDENT'S OFFICE, JOHN GRIER HOME,
April 4.
THE PENDLETON FAMILY,
Palm Beach, Florida.
Dear Sir and Madam:
I have weathered my first visitors' day, and made the trustees a beautiful speech. Everybody said it was a beautiful speech—even my enemies.
Mr. Gordon Hallock's recent visit was exceptionally opportune; I gleaned from him many suggestions as to how to carry an audience.
"Be funny."—I told about Sadie Kate and a few other cherubs that you don't know.
"Keep it concrete and fitted to the intelligence of your audience."—I watched the Hon. Cy, and never said a thing that he couldn't understand.
"Flatter your hearers."—I hinted delicately that all of these new reforms were due to the wisdom and initiative of our peerless trustees.
"Give it a high moral tone, with a dash of pathos."—I dwelt upon the parentless condition of these little wards of Society. And it was very affecting—my enemy wiped away a tear!
Then I fed them up on chocolate and whipped cream and lemonade and tartar sandwiches, and sent them home, expansive and beaming, but without any appetite for dinner.
I dwell thus at length upon our triumph, in order to create in you a happy frame of mind, before passing to the higeous calamity that so nearly wrecked the occasion.
"Now follows the dim horror of my tale,And I feel I'm growing gradually pale,For, even at this day,Though its smell has passed away,When I venture to remember it, I quail!"
You never heard of our little Tammas Kehoe, did you? I simply haven't featured Tammas because he requires so much ink and time and vocabulary. He's a spirited lad, and he follows his dad, a mighty hunter of old—that sounds like more Bab Ballads, but it isn't; I made it up as I went along.
We can't break Tammas of his inherited predatory instincts. He shoots the chickens with bows and arrows and lassoes the pigs and plays bull-fight with the cows—and oh, is very destructive! But his crowning villainy occurred an hour before the trustees' meeting, when we wanted to be so clean and sweet and engaging.
It seems that he had stolen the rat trap from the oat bin, and had set it up in the wood lot, and yesterday morning was so fortunate as to catch a fine big skunk.
Singapore was the first to report the discovery. He returned to the house and rolled on the rugs in a frenzy of remorse over his part of the business. While our attention was occupied with Sing, Tammas was busily skinning his prey in the seclusion of the woodshed. He buttoned the pelt inside his jacket, conveyed it by a devious route through the length of this building, and concealed it under his bed where he thought it wouldn't be found.
Then he went—per schedule—to the basement to help freeze the ice-cream for our guests. You notice that we omitted ice-cream from the menu.
In the short time that remained we created all the counter-irritation that was possible. Noah (negro furnace man) started smudge fires at intervals about the grounds. Cook waved a shovelful of burning coffee through the house. Betsy sprinkled the corridors with ammonia. Miss Snaith daintily treated the rugs with violet water. I sent an emergency call to the doctor who came and mixed a gigantic solution of chlorid of lime. But still, above and beneath and through every other odor, the unlaid ghost of Tammas's victim cried for vengeance.
The first business that came up at the meeting, was whether we should dig a hole and bury, not only Tammas, but the whole main building. You can see with what finesse I carried off the shocking event, when I tell you that the Hon. Cy went home chuckling over a funny story, instead of grumbling at the new superintendent's inability to manage boys.
We've our ain bit weird to dree!
As ever,
S. McBRIDE.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Friday, likewise Saturday.
Dear Judy:
Singapore is still living in the carriage house, and receiving a daily carbolic-scented bath from Tammas Kehoe. I am hoping that some day, in the distant future, my darling will be fit to return.
You will be pleased to hear that I have instituted a new method of spending your money. We are henceforth to buy a part of our shoes and drygoods and drug store comestibles from local shops, at not quite such low prices as the wholesale jobbers give, but still at a discount, and the education that is being thrown in is worth the difference. The reason is this: I have made the discovery that half of my children know nothing of money or its purchasing power. They think that shoes and corn meal and red-flannel petticoats and mutton stew and gingham shirts just float down from the blue sky.
Last week I dropped a new green dollar bill out of my purse, and an eight-year-old urchin picked it up and asked if he could keep that picture of a bird. (American eagle in the center.) That child had never seen a bill in his life! I began an investigation, and discovered that dozens of children in this asylum have never bought anything or have ever seen anybody buy anything. And we are planning to turn them out at sixteen into a world governed entirely by the purchasing power of dollars and cents! Good heavens! just think of it! They are not to lead sheltered lives with somebody eternally looking after them; they have got to know how to get the very most they can out of every penny they can manage to earn.
I pondered the question all one night, at intervals, and went to the village at nine o'clock the next morning. I held conferences with seven storekeepers; found four open-minded and helpful, two doubtful, and one actively stupid. I have started with the four—drygoods, groceries, shoes, and stationery. In return for somewhat large orders from us, they are to turn themselves and their clerks into teachers for my children, who are to go to the stores, inspect the stocks, and do their own purchasing with real money.
For example, Jane needs a spool of blue sewing-silk and a yard of elastic; so two little girls, intrusted with a silver quarter, trot hand in hand to Mr. Meeker's. They match the silk with anxious care, and watch the clerk jealously while he measures the elastic, to make sure that he doesn't stretch it. Then they bring back six cents change, receive my thanks and praise, and retire to the ranks tingling with a sense of achievement.
Isn't it pathetic? Ordinary children of ten or twelve automatically know so many things that our little incubator chicks have never dreamed of. But I have a variety of plans on foot. Just give me time, and you will see. One of these days I'll be turning out some nearly normal youngsters.
LATER.
I've an empty evening ahead, so I'll settle to some further gossip with you.
You remember the peanuts that Gordon Hallock sent? Well, I was so gracious when I thanked him that it incited him to fresh effort. He apparently went into a toy shop, and placed himself unreservedly in the hands of an enterprising clerk. Yesterday two husky expressmen deposited in our front hall a crate full of expensive furry animals built to be consumed by the children of the rich. They are not exactly what I should have purchased had I been the one to disburse such a fortune, but my babies find them very huggable. The chicks are now taking to bed with them lions and elephants and bears and giraffes. I don't know what the psychological effect will be. Do you suppose when they grow up they will all join the circus?
Oh, dear me, here is Miss Snaith, coming to pay a social call.
Good-by.
S.
P.S. The prodigal has returned. He sends his respectful regards, and three wags of the tail.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
April 7. My dear Judy:
I have just been reading a pamphlet on manual training for girls, and another on the proper diet for institutions—right proportions of proteins, fats, starches, etc. In these days of scientific charity, when every problem has been tabulated, you can run an institution by chart. I don't see how Mrs. Lippett could have made all the mistakes she did, assuming, of course,that she knew how to read. But there is one quite important branch of institutional work that has not been touched upon, and I myself am gathering data. Some day I shall issue a pamphlet on the "Management and Control of Trustees."
I must tell you the joke about my enemy—not the Hon. Cy, but my first, my original enemy. He has undertaken a new field of endeavor. He says quite soberly (everything he does is sober; he has never smiled yet) that he has been watching me closely since my arrival, and though I am untrained and foolish and flippant (sic), he doesn't think that I am really so superficial as I at first appeared. I have an almost masculine ability of grasping the whole of a question and going straight to the point.
Aren't men funny? When they want to pay you the greatest compliment in their power, they naively tell you that you have a masculine mind. There is one compliment, incidentally, that I shall never be paying him. I cannot honestly say that he has a quickness of perception almost feminine.
So, though Sandy quite plainly sees my faults, still, he thinks that some of them may be corrected; and he has determined to carry on my education from the point where the college dropped it. A person in my position ought to be well read in physiology, biology, psychology, sociology, and eugenics; she should know the hereditary effects of insanity, idiocy, and alcohol; should be able to administer the Binet test; and should understand the nervous system of a frog. In pursuance whereof, he has placed at my disposal his own scientific library of four thousand volumes. He not only fetches in the books he wants me to read, but comes and asks questions to make sure I haven't skipped.
We devoted last week to the life and letters of the Jukes family. Margaret, the mother of criminals, six generations ago, founded a prolific line, and her progeny, mostly in jail, now numbers some twelve hundred. Moral: watch the children with a bad heredity so carefully that none of them can ever have any excuse for growing up into Jukeses.
So now, as soon as we have finished our tea, Sandy and I get out the Doomsday Book, and pore over its pages in an anxious search for alcoholic parents. It's a cheerful little game to while away the twilight hour after the day's work is done.
QUELLE VIE! Come home fast and take me out of it. I'm wearying for the sight of you.
SALLIE. J. G. H.,
Thursday morning. My dear Pendleton Family:
I have received your letter, and I seize my pen to stop you. I don't wish to be relieved. I take it back. I change my mind. The person you are planning to send sounds like an exact twin of Miss Snaith. How can you ask me to turn over my darling children to a kind, but ineffectual, middle-aged lady without any chin? The very thought of it wrings a mother's heart.
Do you imagine that such a woman can carry on this work even temporarily? No! The manager of an institution like this has got to be young and husky and energetic and forceful and efficient and red-haired and sweet-tempered, like me. Of course I've been discontented,—anybody would be with things in such a mess,—but it's what you socialists call a holy discontent. And do you think that I am going to abandon all of the beautiful reforms I have so painstakingly started? No! I am not to be moved from this spot until you find a superintendent superior to Sallie McBride.
That does not mean, though, that I am mortgaging myself forever. Just for the present, until things get on their feet. While the face washing, airing, reconstructing period lasts, I honestly believe you chose the right person when you hit upon me. I LOVE to plan improvements and order people about.
This is an awfully messy letter, but I'm dashing it off in three minutes in order to catch you before you definitely engage that pleasant, inefficient middle-aged person without a chin.
Please, kind lady and gentleman, don't do me out of me job! Let me stay a few months longer. Just gimme a chance to show what I'm good for, and I promise you won't never regret it.
S. McB.
J. G. H.,
Thursday afternoon.
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.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Sunday.
Dear Gordon:
I know that I haven't written lately; you have a perfect right to grumble, but oh dear! oh dear! you can't imagine what a busy person an orphan asylum superintendent is. And all the writing energy I possess has to be expended upon that voracious Judy Abbott Pendleton. If three days go by without a letter she telegraphs to know if the asylum has burned; whereas, if you—nice man—go letterless, you simply send us a present to remind us of your existence. So, you see, it's distinctly to our advantage to slight you often.
You will probably be annoyed when I tell you that I have promised to stay on here. They finally did find a woman to take my place, but she wasn't at all the right type and would have answered only temporarily. And, my dear Gordon, it's true, when I faced saying good-by to this feverish planning and activity, Worcester somehow looked rather colorless. I couldn't bear to let my asylum go unless I was sure of substituting a life packed equally full of sensation.
I know the alternative you will suggest, but please don't—just now. I told you before that I must have a few months longer to make up my mind. And in the meantime I like the feeling that I'm of use in the world. There's something constructive and optimistic about working with children; that is, if you look at it from my cheerful point of view, and not from our Scotch doctor's. I've never seen anybody like that man; he's always pessimistic and morbid and down. It's best not to be too intelligent about insanity and dipsomania and all the other hereditary details. I am just about ignorant enough to be light-hearted and effective in a place like this.
The thought of all of these little lives expanding in every direction eternally thrills me. There are so many possibilities in our child garden for every kind of flower. It has been planted rather promiscuously, to be sure, but though we undoubtedly shall gather a number of weeds, we are also hoping for some rare and beautiful blossoms. Am I not growing sentimental? It is due to hunger—and there goes the dinner-gong! We are going to have a delicious meal: roast beef and creamed carrots and beet greens, with rhubarb pie for dessert. Would you not like to dine with me? I should love to have you.
Most cordially yours,
S. McB.
P.S. You should see the number of poor homeless cats that these children want to adopt. We had four when I came, and they have all had kittens since. I haven't taken an exact census, but I think the institution possesses nineteen.
April 15. My dear Judy:
You'd like to make another slight donation to the J. G. H. out of the excess of last month's allowance? BENE! Will you kindly have the following inserted in all low-class metropolitan dailies:
Notice!To Parents Planning to Abandon their Children:Please do it before they have reached their third year.
I can't think of any action on the part of abandoning parents that would help us more effectually. This having to root up evil before you begin planting good is slow, discouraging work.
We have one child here who has almost floored me; but I WILL NOT acknowledge myself beaten by a child of five. He alternates between sullen moroseness, when he won't speak a word, and the most violent outbursts of temper, when he smashes everything within reach. He has been here only three months, and in that time he has destroyed nearly every piece of bric-a-brac in the institution—not, by the way, a great loss to art.
A month or so before I came he pulled the tablecloth from the officers' table while the girl in charge was in the corridor sounding the gong. The soup had already been served. You can imagine the mess! Mrs. Lippett half killed the child on that occasion, but the killing did nothing to lessen the temper, which was handed on to me intact.
His father was Italian and his mother Irish; he has red hair and freckles from County Cork and the most beautiful brown eyes that ever came out of Naples. After the father was stabbed in a fight and the mother had died of alcoholism, the poor little chap by some chance or other got to us. I suspect that he belongs in the Catholic Protectory. As for his manners—oh dear! oh dear! They are what you would expect. He kicks and bites and swears. I have dubbed him Punch.
Yesterday he was brought squirming and howling to my office, charged with having knocked down a little girl and robbed her of her doll. Miss Snaith plumped him into a chair behind me, and left him to grow quiet, while I went on with my writing. I was suddenly startled by an awful crash. He had pushed that big green jardiniere off the window-sill and broken it into five hundred pieces. I jumped with a suddenness that swept the ink-bottle to the floor, and when Punch saw that second catastrophe, he stopped roaring with rage and threw back his head and roared with laughter. The child is DIABOLICAL.
I have determined to try a new method of discipline that I don't believe in the whole of his forlorn little life he has ever experienced. I am going to see what praise and encouragement and love will do. So, instead of scolding him about the jardiniere, I assumed that it was an accident. I kissed him and told him not to feel bad; that I didn't mind in the least. It shocked him into being quiet; he simply held his breath and stared while I wiped away his tears and sopped up the ink.
The child just now is the biggest problem that the J. G. H. affords. He needs the most patient, loving, individual care—a proper mother and father, likewise some brothers and sisters and a grandmother. But I can't place him in a respectable family until I make over his language and his propensity to break things. I separated him from the other children, and kept him in my room all the morning, Jane having removed to safe heights all destructible OBJETS D'ART. Fortunately, he loves to draw, and he sat on a rug for two hours, and occupied himself with colored pencils. He was so surprised when I showed an interest in a red-and-green ferryboat, with a yellow flag floating from the mast, that he became quite profanely affable. Until then I couldn't get a word out of him.
In the afternoon Dr. MacRae dropped in and admired the ferryboat, while Punch swelled with the pride of creation. Then, as a reward for being such a good little boy, the doctor took him out in his automobile on a visit to a country patient.
Punch was restored to the fold at five o'clock by a sadder and wiser doctor. At a sedate country estate he had stoned the chickens, smashed a cold frame, and swung the pet Angora cat by its tail. Then when the sweet old lady tried to make him be kind to poor pussy, he told her to go to hell.
I can't bear to consider what some of these children have seen and experienced. It will take years of sunshine and happiness and love to eradicate the dreadful memories that they have stored up in the far-back corners of their little brains. And there are so many children and so few of us that we can't hug them enough; we simply haven't arms or laps to go around.
MAIS PARLONS D'AUTRES CHOSES! Those awful questions of heredity and environment that the doctor broods over so constantly are getting into my blood, too; and it's a vicious habit. If a person is to be of any use in a place like this, she must see nothing but good in the world. Optimism is the only wear for a social worker.
"'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock"—do you know where that beautiful line of poetry comes from? "Cristabel," of English K. Mercy! how I hated that course! You, being an English shark, liked it; but I never understood a word that was said from the time I entered the classroom till I left it. However, the remark with which I opened this paragraph is true. It IS the middle of night by the mantelpiece clock, so I'll wish you pleasant dreams. ADDIO!
SALLIE.
Tuesday.
Dear Enemy:
You doctored the whole house, then stalked past my library with your nose in the air, while I was waiting tea with a plate of Scotch scones sitting on the trivet, ordered expressly for you as a peace-offering.
If you are really hurt, I will read the Kallikak book; but I must tell you that you are working me to death. It takes almost all of my energy to be an effective superintendent, and this university extension course that you are conducting I find wearing. You remember how indignant you were one day last week because I confessed to having stayed up until one o'clock the night before? Well, my dear man, if I were to accomplish all the vicarious reading you require, I should sit up until morning every night.
However, bring it in. I usually manage half an hour of recreation after dinner, and though I had wanted to glance at Wells's latest novel, I will amuse myself instead with your feeble-minded family.
Life of late is unco steep. Obligingly yours,
S. McB.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
April 17.
Dear Gordon:
Thank you for the tulips, likewise the lilies of the valley. They are most becoming to my blue Persian bowls.
Have you ever heard of the Kallikaks? Get the book and read them up. They are a two-branch family in New Jersey, I think, though their real name and origin is artfully concealed. But, anyway,—and this is true,—six generations ago a young gentleman, called for convenience Martin Kallikak, got drunk one night and temporarily eloped with a feeble-minded barmaid, thus founding a long line of feeble-minded Kallikaks,—drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes, horse thieves,—a scourge to New Jersey and surrounding States.
Martin later straightened up, married a normal woman, and founded a second line of proper Kallikaks,—judges, doctors, farmers, professors, politicians,—a credit to their country. And there the two branches still are, flourishing side by side. You can see what a blessing it would have been to New Jersey if something drastic had happened to that feeble-minded barmaid in her infancy.
It seems that feeblemindedness is a very hereditary quality, and science isn't able to overcome it. No operation has been discovered for introducing brains into the head of a child who didn't start with them. And the child grows up with, say, a nine-year brain in a thirty-year body, and becomes an easy tool for any criminal he meets. Our prisons are one-third full of feeble-minded convicts. Society ought to segregate them on feeble-minded farms, where they can earn their livings in peaceful menial pursuits, and not have children. Then in a generation or so we might be able to wipe them out.
Did you know all that? It's very necessary information for a politician to have. Get the book and read it, please; I'd send my copy only that it's borrowed.
It's also very necessary information for me to have. There are eleven of these chicks that I suspect a bit, and I am SURE of Loretta Higgins. I have been trying for a month to introduce one or two basic ideas into that child's brain, and now I know what the trouble is: her head is filled with a sort of soft cheesy substance instead of brain.
I came up here to make over this asylum in such little details as fresh air and food and clothes and sunshine, but, heavens! you can see what problems I am facing. I've got to make over society first, so that it won't send me sub-normal children to work with. Excuse all this excited conversation; but I've just met up with the subject of feeble-mindedness, and it's appalling—and interesting. It is your business as a legislator to make laws that will remove it from the world. Please attend to this immediately, And oblige,
S. McBRIDE,
Sup't John Grier Home.
Friday.
Dear Man of Science:
You didn't come today. Please don't skip us tomorrow. I have finished the Kallikak family and I am bursting with talk. Don't you think we ought to have a psychologist examine these children?
We owe it to adopting parents not to saddle them with feeble-minded offspring.
You know, I'm tempted to ask you to prescribe arsenic for Loretta's cold. I've diagnosed her case; she's a Kallikak. Is it right to let her grow up and found a line of 378 feeble-minded people for society to care for? Oh dear! I do hate to poison the child, but what can I do?
S. McB.
Dear Gordon:
You aren't interested in feeble-minded people, and you are shocked because I am? Well, I am equally shocked because you are not. If you aren't interested in everything of the sort that there unfortunately is in this world, how can you make wise laws?
You can't.
However, at your request, I will converse upon a less morbid subject. I've just bought fifty yards of blue and rose and green and corn-colored hair-ribbon as an Easter present for my fifty little daughters. I am also thinking of sending you an Easter present. How would a nice fluffy little kitten please you? I can offer any of the following patterns:—
Number 3 comes in any color, gray, black, or yellow. If you will let me know which you would rather have, I will express it at once.
I would write a respectable letter, but it's teatime, and I see that a guest approaches.
ADDIO! SALLIE.
P.S. Don't you know some one who would like to adopt a desirable baby boy with seventeen nice new teeth?
April 20. My dear Judy:
One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns! We've had a Good Friday present of ten dozen, given by Mrs. De Peyster Lambert, a high church, stained-glass-window soul whom I met at a tea a few days ago. (Who says now that teas are a silly waste of time?) She asked me about my "precious little waifs," and said I was doing a noble work and would be rewarded. I saw buns in her eye, and sat down and talked to her for half an hour.
Now I shall go and thank her in person, and tell her with a great deal of affecting detail how much those buns were appreciated by my precious little waifs—omitting the account of how precious little Punch threw his bun at Miss Snaith and plastered her neatly in the eye. I think, with encouragement, Mrs. De Peyster Lambert can be developed into a cheerful giver.
Oh, I'm growing into the most shocking beggar! My family don't dare to visit me, because I demand BAKSHISH in such a brazen manner. I threatened to remove father from my calling list unless he shipped immediately sixty-five pairs of overalls for my prospective gardeners. A notice from the freight office this morning asks me to remove two packing cases consigned to them by the J. L. McBride Co. of Worcester; so I take it that father desires to continue my acquaintance. Jimmie hasn't sent us anything yet, and he's getting a huge salary. I write him frequently a pathetic list of our needs.
But Gordon Hallock has learned the way to a mother's heart. I was so pleasant about the peanuts and menagerie that now he sends a present of some sort every few days, and I spend my entire time composing thank-you letters that aren't exact copies of the ones I've sent before. Last week we received a dozen big scarlet balls. The nursery is FULL of them; you kick them before you as you walk. And yesterday there arrived a half-bushel of frogs and ducks and fishes to float in the bathtubs.
Send, O best of trustees, the tubs in which to float them!
I am, as usual,
S. McBRIDE.
Tuesday. My dear Judy:
Spring must be lurking about somewhere; the birds are arriving from the South. Isn't it time you followed their example?
Society note from the BIRD O' PASSAGE NEWS:
"Mr. and Mrs. First Robin have returned from a trip to Florida. It is hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Jervis Pendleton will arrive shortly."
Even up here in our dilatory Dutchess County the breeze smells green. It makes you want to be out and away, roaming the hills, or else down on your knees grubbing in the dirt. Isn't it funny what farmering instincts the budding spring awakens in even the most urban souls?
I have spent the morning making plans for little private gardens for every child over nine. The big potato field is doomed. That is the only feasible spot for sixty-two private gardens. It is near enough to be watched from the north windows, and yet far enough away, so that their messing will not injure our highly prized landscape lawn. Also the earth is rich, and they have some chance of success. I don't want the poor little chicks to scratch all summer, and then not turn up any treasure in the end. In order to furnish an incentive, I shall announce that the institution will buy their produce and pay in real money, though I foresee we shall be buried under a mountain of radishes.
I do so want to develop self-reliance and initiative in these children, two sturdy qualities in which they are conspicuously lacking (with the exception of Sadie Kate and a few other bad ones). Children who have spirit enough to be bad I consider very hopeful. It's those who are good just from inertia that are discouraging.
The last few days have been spent mainly in charming the devil out of Punch, an interesting task if I could devote my whole time to it. But with one hundred and seven other little devils to charm away, my attention is sorely deflected.
The awful thing about this life is that whatever I am doing, the other things that I am not doing, but ought to be, keep tugging at my skirts. There is no doubt but Punch's personal devil needs the whole attention of a whole person,—preferably two persons,—so that they could spell each other and get some rest.
Sadie Kate has just flown in from the nursery with news of a scarlet goldfish (Gordon's gift) swallowed by one of our babies. Mercy! the number of calamities that can occur in an orphan asylum!
9 P.M.
My children are in bed, and I've just had a thought. Wouldn't it be heavenly if the hibernating system prevailed among the human young? There would be some pleasure in running an asylum if one could just tuck the little darlings into bed the first of October and keep them there until the twenty-second of April.
I'm yours, as ever,
SALLIE.
April 24.
Dear Jervis Pendleton, Esq.:
This is to supplement a night telegram which I sent you ten minutes ago. Fifty words not being enough to convey any idea of my emotions, I herewith add a thousand.
As you will know by the time you receive this, I have discharged the farmer, and he has refused to be discharged. Being twice the size of me, I can't lug him to the gate and chuck him out. He wants a notification from the president of the board of trustees written in vigorous language on official paper in typewriting. So, dear president of the board of trustees, kindly supply all of this at your earliest convenience.
Here follows the history of the case:
The winter season still being with us when I arrived and farming activities at a low ebb, I have heretofore paid little attention to Robert Sterry except to note on two occasions that his pigpens needed cleaning; but today I sent for him to come and consult with me in regard to spring planting.
Sterry came, as requested, and seated himself at ease in my office with his hat upon his head. I suggested as tactfully as might be that he remove it, an entirely necessary request, as little orphan boys were in and out on errands, and "hats off in the house" is our first rule in masculine deportment.
Sterry complied with my request, and stiffened himself to be against whatever I might desire.
I proceeded to the subject in hand, namely, that the diet of the John Grier Home in the year to come is to consist less exclusively of potatoes. At which our farmer grunted in the manner of the Hon. Cyrus Wykoff, only it was a less ethereal and gentlemanly grunt than a trustee permits himself. I enumerated corn and beans and onions and peas and tomatoes and beets and carrots and turnips as desirable substitutes.
Sterry observed that if potatoes and cabbages was good enough for him, he guessed they was good enough for charity children.
I proceeded imperturbably to say that the two-acre potato field was to be plowed and fertilized, and laid out into sixty individual gardens, the boys assisting in the work.
At that Sterry exploded. The two-acre field was the most fertile and valuable piece of earth on the whole place. He guessed if I was to break that up into play gardens for the children to mess about in, I'd be hearing about it pretty danged quick from the board of trustees. That field was fitted for potatoes, it had always raised potatoes, and it was going to continue to raise them just as long as he had anything to say about it.
"You have nothing whatever to say about it," I amiably replied. "I have decided that the two-acre field is the best plot to use for the children's gardens, and you and the potatoes will have to give way."
Whereupon he rose in a storm of bucolic wrath, and said he'd be gol darned if he'd have a lot of these danged city brats interfering with his work.
I explained—very calmly for a red-haired person with Irish forebears—that this place was run for the exclusive benefit of these children; that the children were not here to be exploited for the benefit of the place, a philosophy which he did not grasp, though my fancy city language had a slightly dampening effect. I added that what I required in a farmer was the ability and patience to instruct the boys in gardening and simple outdoor work; that I wished a man of large sympathies whose example would be an inspiring influence to these children of the city streets.
Sterry, pacing about like a caged woodchuck, launched into a tirade about silly Sunday-school notions, and, by a transition which I did not grasp, passed to a review of the general subject of woman's suffrage. I gathered that he is not in favor of the movement. I let him argue himself quiet, then I handed him a check for his wages, and told him to vacate the tenant house by twelve o'clock next Wednesday.
Sterry says he'll be danged if he will. (Excuse so many DANGEDS. It is the creature's only adjective.) He was engaged to work for this institution by the president of the board of trustees, and he will not move from that house until the president of the board of trustees tells him to go. I don't think poor Sterry realizes that since his arrival a new president has come to the throne.
ALORS you have the story. I make no threats, but Sterry or McBride—take your choice, dear sir.
I am also about to write to the head of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, at Amherst, asking him to recommend a good, practical man with a nice, efficient, cheerful wife, who will take the entire care of our modest domain of seventeen acres, and who will be a man with the right personality to place over our boys.
If we get the farming end of this institution into running shape, it ought to furnish not only beans and onions for the table, but education for our hands and brains.
I remain, sir, Yours most truly, S. McBRIDE, Superintendent of the John Grier Home.
P.S. I think that Sterry will probably come back some night and throw rocks through the windows. Shall I have them insured?
My dear Enemy:
You disappeared so quickly this afternoon that I had no chance to thank you, but the echoes of that discharge penetrated as far as my library. Also, I have viewed the debris. What on earth did you do to poor Sterry? Watching the purposeful set of your shoulders as you strode toward the carriage house, I was filled with sudden compunction. I did not want the man murdered, merely reasoned with. I am afraid you were a little harsh.
However, your technic seems to have been effective. Report says that he has telephoned for a moving wagon and that Mrs. Sterry is even now on her hands and knees ripping up the parlor carpet.
For this relief much thanks.
SALLIE McBRIDE.
April 26.
Dear Jervis:
Your vigorous telegram was, after all, not needed. Dr. Robin MacRae, who is a grand PAWKY mon when it comes to a fight, accomplished the business with beautiful directness. I was so bubbling with rage that immediately after writing to you I called up the doctor on the telephone, and rehearsed the whole business over again. Now, our Sandy, whatever his failings (and he has them), does have an uncommon supply of common sense. He knows how useful those gardens are going to be, and how worse than useless Sterry was. Also says he, "The superintendent's authority must be upheld." (That, incidentally, is beautiful, coming from him.) But anyway, those were his words. And he hung up the receiver, cranked up his car, and flew up here at lawless speed. He marched straight to Sterry, impelled by a fine Scotch rage, and he discharged the man with such vigor and precision, that the carriage house window was shattered to fragments.
Since this morning at eleven, when Sterry's wagonload of furniture rumbled out of the gates, a sweet peace has reigned over the J. G. H. A man from the village is helping us out while we hopefully await the farmer of our dreams.
I am sorry to have troubled you with our troubles. Tell Judy that she owes me a letter, and won't hear from me until she has paid it. Your ob'd't servant,
S. McBRIDE.
Dear Judy:
In my letter of yesterday to Jervis I forgotted (Punch's word) to convey to you our thanks for three tin bathtubs. The skyblue tub with poppies on the side adds a particularly bright note to the nursery. I do love presents for the babies that are too big to be swallowed.
You will be pleased to hear that our manual training is well under way. The carpenter benches are being installed in the old primary room, and until our schoolhouse gets its new addition, our primary class is meeting on the front porch, in accordance with Miss Matthew's able suggestion.
The girls' sewing classes are also in progress. A circle of benches under the copper beech tree accommodates the hand sewers, while the big girls take turns at our three machines. Just as soon as they gain some proficiency we will begin the glorious work of redressing the institution. I know you think I'm slow, but it's really a task to accomplish one hundred and eighty new frocks. And the girls will appreciate them so much more if they do the work themselves.
I may also report that our hygiene system has risen to a high level. Dr. MacRae has introduced morning and evening exercises, and a glass of milk and a game of tag in the middle of school hours. He has instituted a physiology class, and has separated the children into small groups, so that they may come to his house, where he has a manikin that comes apart and shows all its messy insides. They can now rattle off scientific truths about their little digestions as fluently as Mother Goose rhymes. We are really becoming too intelligent for recognition. You would never guess that we were orphans to hear us talk; we are quite like Boston children.
2 P.M.
O Judy, such a calamity! Do you remember several weeks ago I told you about placing out a nice little girl in a nice family home where I hoped she would be adopted? It was a kind Christian family living in a pleasant country village, the foster-father a deacon in the church. Hattie was a sweet, obedient, housewifely little body, and it looked as though we had exactly fitted them to each other. My dear, she was returned this morning for STEALING. Scandal piled on scandal: SHE HAD STOLEN A COMMUNION CUP FROM CHURCH!
Between her sobs and their accusations it took me half an hour to gather the truth. It seems that the church they attend is very modern and hygienic, like our doctor, and has introduced individual communion cups. Poor little Hattie had never heard of communion in her life. In fact, she wasn't very used to church, Sunday-school having always sufficed for her simple religious needs. But in her new home she attended both, and one day, to her pleased surprise, they served refreshments. But they skipped her. She made no comment, however; she is used to being skipped.
But as they were starting home she saw that the little silver cup had been casually left in the seat, and supposing that it was a souvenir that you could take if you wished, she put it into her pocket.
It came to light two days later as the most treasured ornament of her doll's-house. It seems that Hattie long ago saw a set of doll's dishes in a toy shop window, and has ever since dreamed of possessing a set of her own. The communion cup was not quite the same, but it answered. Now, if our family had only had a little less religion and a little more sense, they would have returned the cup, perfectly unharmed, and have marched Hattie to the nearest toy shop and bought her some dishes. But instead, they bundled the child and her belongings into the first train they could catch, and shoved her in at our front door, proclaiming loudly that she was a thief.
I am pleased to say that I gave that indignant deacon and his wife such a thorough scolding as I am sure they have never listened to from the pulpit. I borrowed some vigorous bits from Sandy's vocabulary, and sent them home quite humbled. As for poor little Hattie, here she is back again, after going out with such high hopes. It has an awfully bad moral effect on a child to be returned to the asylum in disgrace, especially when she wasn't aware of committing a crime. It gives her a feeling that the world is full of unknown pitfalls, and makes her afraid to take a step. I must bend all my energies now toward finding another set of parents for her, and ones that haven't grown so old and settled and good that they have entirely forgotten their own childhood.
Sunday.
I forgot to tell you that our new farmer is here, Turnfelt by name; and his wife is a love, yellow hair and dimples. If she were an orphan, I could place her in a minute. We can't let her go to waste. I have a beautiful plan of building an addition to the farmer's cottage, and establishing under her comfortable care a sort of brooding-house where we can place our new little chicks, to make sure they haven't anything contagious and to eliminate as much profanity as possible before turning them loose among our other perfect chicks.
How does that strike you? It is very necessary in an institution as full of noise and movement and stir as this to have some isolated spot where we can put cases needing individual attention. Some of our children have inherited nerves, and a period of quiet contemplation is indicated. Isn't my vocabulary professional and scientific? Daily intercourse with Dr. Robin MacRae is extremely educational.
Since Turnfelt came, you should see our pigs. They are so clean and pink and unnatural that they don't recognize one another any more as they pass.
Our potato field is also unrecognizable. It has been divided with string and pegs into as many squares as a checker-board, and every child has staked out a claim. Seed catalogues form our only reading matter.