over Casa Grande.

Dinkie and his mater, however, have been drawn much closer together
during the last few days. I've talked to him, and read to him, and
without either of us being altogether conscious of it there has been
an opening of a closed door or two. Dinkie loves to be read to. The
new world of the imagination is just opening up to him. And I envy the
rapture of the child in books, rapture not yet spoiled by the
intellectual conceit of the grown-up.

But I'm not the only reader about this ranch. I'm afraid the copy of
Burns which Santa Claus brought to Whinstane Sandy last Christmas is
not adding to his matrimonial tendencies as love-plaints of that
nature should. At noon, as soon as dinner is over, he sits on the back
step, poring over his beloved Tammas. And at night, now that the
evenings are chillier, he retreats to the bunk-house stove, where he
smokes and reads aloud. His own mother, he tells me, used to say many
of those pieces to him when he was a wee laddie. He both outraged and
angered poor Struthers, last Sunday, by reading _Tam O'Shanter_ aloud
to her. That autumnal vestal proclaimed that it was anything but
suitable literature for an old philanderer who still saw fit to live
alone. It showed, she averred, a shocking lack of respect for
women-folk and should be taken over by the police.

Struthers even begins to suspect that this much-thumbed volume of
Burns lies at the root of Whinnie's accumulating misanthropy. She has
asked me if I thought a volume of Mrs. Hemans would be of service in
leading the deluded old misogynist back to the light. The matter has
become a more urgent one since Cuba Sebeck suffered a severe bilious
attack and a consequent sea-change in his affections. But I'm afraid
our Whinnie is too old a bird to be trapped by printer's ink. I
notice, in fact, that Struthers is once more spending her evenings in
knitting winter socks. And I have a shadow of a suspicion that they
are for the obdurate one.

My Dinkie, by the way, has written his first poem, or, rather, his
first two poems. The first one he slipped folded into my sewing-basket
and I found it when I was looking for new buttons for Pauline
Augusta's red sweater. It reads:

No more we smel the sweet clover,
Floting on the breeze all over.
But now we hear the wild geese calling;
And lissen, tis the grey owl yowling.

The second one, however, was a more ambitious