indows open a little and it
won't hurt Dinky-Dink, for that boy gets more ozone than any city child
that was ever wheeled out in the Mall! It can't possibly hurt him. What
hurts me is being away from you so much. And now give me a hug, a tight
one, and tell me that you still love your Lady Bird!" He gave me two,
and then two more, until Tumble-Weed turned round in his stall and
whinnied for us to behave.

_Friday the Fifteenth_

I've been keeping Terry under my eye, and I don't believe he's a
trouble-maker. His first move was to lift Babe out of the cradle, hold
him up and publicly announce that he was a darlin'. Then he pointed out
to me what a wonderful head the child had, feeling his frontal bone and
declaring he was sure to make a great scholar in his time. Dinky-Dunk,
grinning at the sober way in which I was swallowing this, pointedly
inquired of Terry whether it was Milton or Archimedes that Babe most
resembled as to skull formation. But it isn't Terry's blarney that has
made me capitulate; it's the fact that he has proved so companionable
and has slipped so quietly into his place in our little lonely circle of
lives on this ragged edge of nowhere.

And he's as clean as a cat, shaving every blessed morning with a little
old broken-handled razor which he strops on a strip of oiled bootleg.
He declares that razor to be the finest bit of steel in all the
Americas, and showed off before Olie and Olga yesterday morning by
shaving without a looking-glass, which trick he said he learned in the
army. He also gave Olie a hair-cut, which was badly needed, and on
Sunday has promised to rig up a soldering-iron and mend all my pans for
me. He looks little over twenty, but is really thirty and more, and has
been in India and Mexico and Alaska.

I caught him neatly darning his own woolen socks. Instead of betraying
shame at being detected in that effeminate pastime he proudly explained
that he'd learned to do a bit of stitching in the army. He hasn't many
possessions, but he's very neat in his arrangement of them. A good
soldier, he solemnly told me, always had to be a bit of an old maid.
"And you were a grand soldier, Terry, I know," I frankly told him. "I've
done a bit av killing in me time!" he proudly acknowledged. But as he
sat there darning his sock-heel he looked as though he couldn't kill a
field mouse. And in his idle hours he reads _Nick Carter_, a series of
paper-bound detective stories, almost worn to tat