loes used to run. I hear the rattle of the
ash-cans in the morning; and you hear the song of the wind playing
on the harp of summer. I pay five hundred dollars a year to wander
about a smoky club no bigger than your corral; you wander about a
Big Outdoors that rambles off up to the Arctic Circle itself. And
you open a window at night and see the Aurora Borealis in all its
beauty; and I open mine and observe an electric roof-sign
announcing that Somebody's Tonic will take away my tired feeling.
You put up your blind and see God's footstool bright with dew and
dizzy with distance; I put up mine and overlook a wall of brick
and mortar with one window wherein a fat man shaves himself. And
you can go out in the morning and pick yellow crowfoot and range
lilies; and all we can pick about this place of ours are
milk-bottles and morning-papers packed full of murder and theft
and tax-notices!"

Much of that letter, I know, was over Dinkie's head. But it carried a
message or two to Dinkie's mother which in some way threw her heart
into high. It was different from the letter that came the week
before, the one arriving two days ahead of Kingsley's _Water Babies_
with six lines of Hagedorn inscribed on its fly-leaf:

"And here you are to live, and help us live.
Bend close and listen, bird with folded wings.
Here is life's secret: Keep the upward glance;
Remember Aries is your relative,
The Moon's your uncle, and those twinkling things
Your sisters and your cousins and your aunts!"

This letter seemed like the Peter Ketley we knew best, the sad-eyed
Peter with the feather of courage in his cap, the Peter who could
caper and make you forget that his heart had ever been heavy. For he
wrote:

"This time, Dinkie-Boy, I'm going to tell you about the sea. For
the water-tank, as I remember it, is the biggest sea you have at
Casa Grande--unless you count the mud when winter breaks up! And
your prairie, with its long waves of green, is, I suppose, really
a sea that has gone to sleep. But I mean the truly
honest-to-goodness sea which has tides and baby-whales and
steamers and cramps and sea-serpents in it. You saw it once at
Santa Monica, I know, though you may have been too small to
remember. But yesterday, I motored to a place called Atlantic City
where they sell picture post-cards and push you in a wheeled chair
and let you s