property, are in no great favor with
either party of belligerents. The cry is 'Mexico for the
Mexicans'--and one can scarcely blame them. But although I
have seen a little fighting at a distance, and plenty of the
marks of battle along the railroad line as I came up here, I
do not think I am as yet in any great danger.

"Therefore, my dear, do not worry too much about your
father's situation. At the very moment you are worrying he
may be eating supper, or hobnobbing with a party of very
courteous and hospitable ranch owners, or fishing in a
neighboring brook where the trout are as hungry as shoats at
feeding time, or otherwise enjoying himself.

"And so, now, to you and your letter which reached me by
one of my messengers from Juarez, by whom I shall send this
reply. Yes, I knew you would find yourself among a people as
strange to you as though they were inhabitants of another
planet. Relatives though they are, they are so much
different from our friends in and about Greensboro, that I
can understand their being a perfect shock to you.

"I was afraid Jason and Almira lived a sort of shiftless,
hopeless, get-along-the-best-way-you-can life. When I left
Poketown twenty-five years ago I thought it had creeping
paralysis! It must be worse by this time.

"But _you_ keep alive, Janice, my dear. Keep kicking--like
the frog in the milk-can. _Do something._ Don't let the
poison of laziness develop in _your_ blood. If they're in a
slack way there at Jason's, help 'em out of it. Be your
Daddy's own girl. Don't shirk a plain duty. _Do something
yourself, and make others do something, too!_"

There was much in Mr. Broxton Day's letter beside this; there were
intimate little things that Janice would have shown to nobody; but
downstairs she read aloud all Daddy's jolly little comments upon the
country and the people he saw; and about his eating beans so frequently
that he dreamed he had turned into a gigantic Boston bean-pot that was
always full of steaming baked beans. "They are called 'frijoles'," he
wrote; "but a bean by any other name is just the same!"

The paragraphs that impressed Janice most, however, as repeated above,
she likewise kept to herself. Daddy had expected she would find Poketown
just what it was. Yet he expected something of her--something that
should make a change in