d. Remember to tell me
the boy's name.

Yours gratefully if unsatisfactorily,
AUGUST FIRST.

P. S.--Robert Halarkenden isn't his real name. It's his grandmother's
father's name, and Welsh. I don't know the real one.

P. S. No. 2. If it isn't inconsistent, and if you think I'm worth
while, you might pray just a scrap too. That I may get to be like you
and Robin.

P. S. No. 3. But you know it's the truth that I'm balky at giving up
everything in sight. I'd hate myself in bad clothes. _Can't_ I have
good ones and yet be worth while? Oh, I see. It doesn't matter if
they're good or bad so long as I don't care too much. But I do care.
Then they hamper me--eh? Is that the idea? This is the last
postscript to this letter. Write a quick one--I'm needing it.

WARCHESTER,
St. Andrew's Parish House,
Sept. 23d.

I don't think it matters what his real name is. I'd been thinking all
along, that he was just a convenient fiction, useful for an address,
and now he turns out about the realest person going. Sometimes I
imagine perhaps it will be like that when we get through with this
world and wake up into what's after--that the things we've passed over
pretty much here and been vague about will blaze out as the eternal
verities. A miracle happened that day in your September garden.
You've surely read "_Sur la Branche_"--that book written around a
woman's belief in the Providence of God? Well, that's what I mean.
Why did Halarkenden come down out of the woods into your uncle's
garden? Why did you tell him, of all people? Why was it you who got
through to the truth about him? Why did it all happen just the minute
you most needed it? Of course I believe it--every word, exactly as you
wrote it. It's impossible things like that which do happen and help us
to bear the flatly ordinary. It's the incredible things that shout
with reality. Miracles ought to be ordinary affairs--we don't believe
in them because we're always straining every nerve to keep them from
happening. We get so confused in the continual muddle of our own
mistakes that when something does come straight through, as it was
intended to do, we're like those men who heard the voice of God that
day and told one another anxiously that it thundered.

Just think what went to make up those five minutes which gave you the
lift you had to have--that young Scotchman, beating back his devils up
in the lonely mountains all those years ago--that'