way the spoons with the dish-water! But having to fuss so with
that hair is a nuisance, especially at night, when I am so tired that my
pillow seems to bark like a dog for me to come and pat it.

And speaking of that reminds me that I have to order arch-supports for
my feet. I'm on them so much that by bedtime my ankles feel like a
_chocolat mousse_ that's been left out in the sun. Yet this isn't a
whimper, Matilda Anne, for when I turn in I sleep like a child. No more
counting and going to the medicine-chest for coal-tar pills. I abjure
them. I, who used to have so many tricks to bring the starry-eyed
goddess bending over my pillow, hereby announce myself as the noblest
sleeper north of the Line! I no longer need to count the sheep as they
come over the wall, or patiently try to imagine the sound of surf-waves,
or laboriously re-design that perennial dinner-gown which I've kept
tucked away in the cedar-chest of the imagination as long as I can
remember, elaborating it over and over again down to the minutest
details through the longest hour of my whitest white night until it
began to merge into the velvety robes of slumber itself! Nowadays an
ogre called Ten-O'Clock steals up behind my chair with a club in his
hand and stuns me into insensibility. Two or three times, in fact, my
dear old clumsy-fingered Dinky-Dunk has helped me get my clothes off.
But he says that the nicest sound he knows is to lie in bed and hear the
tinkle of my hair-pins as I toss them into the little Coalport pin-tray
on my dresser--which reminds me what Chinkie once said about his idea of
Heaven being eating my divinity-fudge to the sound of trumpets!

I brag about being busy, but I'm not the only busy person about this
wickyup. Olie and Dinky-Dunk talk about summer-fallowing and
double-discing and drag-harrowing and fire-guarding, and I'm beginning
to understand what it all means. They are out with their teams all day
long, working like Trojans. We have mid-day dinner, which Olie bolts in
silence and with the rapidity of chain-lightning. He is the most expert
of sword-swallowers, with a table-knife, and Dinky-Dunk says it keeps
reminding him how Burbank could make a fortune inventing a square pea
that would stay on a knife-blade. But Dinky-Dunk stopped me calling him
"The Sword Swallower" and has privately tipped Olie off as to the
functions of the table fork. How the males of this old earth stick
together! The world of men is a secret order, an