Part 3 (1/2)
_August 28_
You already know the worst about my leanings to Papacy; but to-day I propose to set your mind at rest on an idea with which you have hypnotized yourself--namely, that I am going to die of malnutrition during what you are pleased to term the ”long Arctic winter.” I have no intention of starving, and as for the ”long Arctic winter,” I do not believe there is any such beast, as the farmer said when he looked at the kangaroo in the circus.
I was sitting by my window quietly sewing the other day (that sentence alone should reveal to you how many miles I have travelled from your tutelage) when I overheard one of the children stoutly defending what I took at first to be my character. The next sentence disabused me--it was my figure under discussion.
”She's not fat!” averred Topsy. ”I'll smack you if you says it again.”
”Well,” muttered David, the light of reason being thus forcibly borne in upon him, ”she may not be 'zactly fat, but she's fine and hearty.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: NOT FAT, BUT FINE AND HEARTY]
If this is the case, and my mirror all too plainly confirms the verdict, and the summer has not waned, what will the ”last estate of that woman be,” after the winter has pa.s.sed over her? They tell me that every one here puts on fat in the cold weather as a kind of windproof jacket. I enclose a photograph of me on landing, so you may remember me as I was.
No, you need not worry either over communications in the winter. You really ought to have an intimate acquaintance with our telegraph service, after you have, so to speak, subsidized it during the past three months. It runs in winter as well as summer; and I see no prospect of its closing if you keep it on such a sound financial basis. Moreover, the building is devoted to the administration of the law in all its branches. One half of it is the post and telegraph office, while the other serves as the jail. The whole structure is within a stone's throw of the church and school, as if the corrective inst.i.tutions of the place believed in intensive cultivation. But to return to the jail. The walls are very thin, and every sound from it can be plainly heard in the telegraph office adjoining. Friday morning the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in compet.i.tion with the mail steamer's winch rather than with Delilah's ”bawling.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: DELILAH BAWLING]
I know all about compet.i.tion in noises after trying to write in this house. The ceilings are low and thin, and the walls are near and thin, and the children are omnipresent and not thin, and their wants and their joys and their quarrels are as numerous as the fishes in the sea, and there you have the problem in a nutsh.e.l.l.
Now I must ”hapse the door,” and hie me to bed. As a matter of fact the people here are far too honest for us to lock the doors. Such a thing as theft is unheard of. Some may call it uncivilized. I call it the millennium!
_August 31_
I believe that the writer who described the climate of this country as being ”nine months snow and three months winter” was not far from the truth. In June the temperature of our rooms registered just above freezing point, in July we were enveloped in continuous fog, and in August we are having snow.
Such a tragic event has occurred. Our lettuce has been eaten by the Mission cow! You know how hard it is to get anything to grow here.
Well, after having nearly killed ourselves in making a square inch of ground into something resembling a bed, we had watched this lettuce grow from day to day as the little green shoots struggled bravely against the frost and cold. Then a few nights ago I was awakened by the tinkle of a bell beneath my window. Hastily flinging on wrapper and shoes I fled to save our one and only ewe lamb. But all the morning light revealed was a desperate cold in the head, and an empty bed from which the glory had departed.
Topsy has just been amusing herself by turning on the corridor taps to watch the water run downstairs! Oh! Topsy,
”'Tis thine to teach us what dull hearts forget How near of kin we are to springing flowers.”
News has just reached us that the mail boat from St. Barbe to St.
Antoine has gone ash.o.r.e on the rocks and is a total wreck. Happily no lives were lost, but unhappily wrecks are of such frequent occurrence on this dangerous coast as to excite little comment.
Drusilla, aged five, has been to my door to enquire if the children may play with their dolls in the house. I believe in open-air treatment, so I replied with kindness, but firmly withal, that ”out of doors” was the order of the day. I was a little electrified to hear her return to the playroom and announce that ”Teacher says you are to go out, every darned one of you!” I was equally electrified the other day to overhear Drusilla enquiring of her fellow philosophers which they liked the best, ”Teacher, the Doctor, or the Lord Jesus Christ.”
In the midst of writing to you I was called away to interview a young man from the other side of the harbour. He wanted me to give him some of the milk used in the Home, for his baby, as at the hospital they could only furnish him with canned milk, guaranteed by the label, he claimed, to give ”typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever”!
_September 7_
It is a windy, rainy night, and I have told Topsy, who has a cold, that she cannot come with us to church. After a wild outburst of anger she was heard to mutter that ”Teacher wouldn't let her go to church because she was afraid she would get too good.”