here's a queer little newspaper cutting that she sent
me one blizzardy Sunday telling all about some big violin maker who
always went out into the forests himself and chose his violin woods
from the _north_ side of the trees. Casual little item. You don't
think anything about it at the moment. It probably isn't true. And to
save your soul you couldn't tell what kind of trees violins are made
out of, anyway. But I'll wager that never again will you wake in the
night to listen to the wind without thinking of the great
storm-tossed, moaning, groaning, slow-toughening forest
trees--learning to be violins!... And here's a funny little old silver
porringer that she gave me, she says, to make my 'old gray gruel taste
shinier.' And down at the bottom of the bowl--the ruthless little
pirate--she's taken a knife or a pin or something and scratched the
words, 'Excellent Child!'--But you know I never noticed that part of
it at all till last week. You see I've only been eating down to the
bottom of the bowl just about a week.--And here's a catalogue of a
boy's school, four or five catalogues in fact that she sent me one
evening and asked me if I please wouldn't look them over right away
and help her decide where to send her little brother. Why, man, it
took me almost all night! If you get the athletics you want in one
school, then likelier than not you slip up on the manual training,
and if they're going to schedule eight hours a week for Latin, why
where in Creation--?"

Shrugging his shoulders as though to shrug aside absolutely any
possible further responsibility concerning, "little brother," Stanton
began to dig down deeper into the box. Then suddenly all the grin came
back to his face.

"And here are some sample wall papers that she sent me for 'our
house'," he confided, flushing. "What do you think of that bronze one
there with the peacock feathers?--say, old man, think of a
library--and a cannel coal fire--and a big mahogany desk--and a
red-haired girl sitting against that paper! And this sun-shiny tint
for a breakfast-room isn't half bad, is it?--Oh yes, and here are the
time-tables, and all the pink and blue maps about Colorado and Arizona
and the 'Painted Desert'. If we can 'afford it,' she writes, she
'wishes we could go to the Painted Desert on our wedding trip.'--But
really, old man, you know it isn't such a frightfully expensive
journey. Why if you leave New York on Wednesday--Oh, hang it all!
What's the use of sho