on a bit. She is still the same efficient and
self-obliterating mainstay of the kitchen that she ever was, but she
grows more "sot" in her ways, more averse to any change in her daily
routine, and more despairing of ever finally and completely capturing
that canny old Scotsman whom we still so affectionately designate as
Whinnie, in short for Whinstane Sandy. Whinnie, I'm afraid, still
nurses the fixed idea that everything in petticoats and as yet
unwedded is after him. And it is only by walking with the utmost
circumspection that he escapes their wiles and by maintaining an
unbroken front withstands their unseemly advances.

The new school-teacher has arrived, and is to live with us here at
Casa Grande. I have my reasons for this. In the first place, it will
be a help to Dinkie in his studies. In the second place, it means that
the teacher can pack my boy back and forth to school, in bad weather,
and next month when Poppsy joins the ranks of the learners, can keep a
more personal eye on that little tot's movements. And in the third
place the mere presence of another male at Casa Grande seems to dilute
the acids of home life.

Gershom Binks is the name of this new teacher, and I have just learned
that in the original Hebrew "Gershom" not inappropriately means "a
stranger there." He is a sophomore (a most excellent word, that, when
you come to inquire into its etymology!) from the University of
Minnesota and is compelled to teach the young idea, for a time, to
accumulate sufficient funds to complete his course, which he wants to
do at Ann Arbor. And Gershom is a very tall and very thin and very
short-sighted young man, with an Adam's apple that works up and down
with a two-inch plunge over the edge of his collar when he
talks--which he does somewhat extensively. He wears glasses with big
bulging lenses, glasses which tend to hide a pair of timid and
brown-October-aleish eyes with real kindliness in them. He looks
ill-nourished, but I can detect nothing radically wrong with his
appetite. It's merely that, like Cassius, he thinks too much. And I'm
going to fatten that boy up a bit, before the year is out, or know the
reason why. He may be a trifle self-conscious and awkward, but he's
also amazingly clean of both body and mind, and it will be no
hardship, I know, to have him under our roof. And for all his devotion
to Science, he reads his Bible every night--which is more than Chaddie
McKail does! He rather took the wind