ghts have
been running of late. And I just as pointedly retorted that I'd never
consent to the sale of Casa Grande. It's not merely because it's our
one and only home. It's more because of the little knoll where the
four Manitoba maples have been set and the row of prairie-roses have
been planted along the little iron fence, the little iron fence which
twice a year I paint a virginal white, with my own hands. For that's
where my Pee-Wee sleeps, and that lonely little grave must never pass
out of my care, to be forgotten and neglected and tarnished with
time. It's not a place of sorrow now, but more an altar, duly tended,
the flower-covered bed of my Pee-Wee, of my poor little Pee-Wee who
was so brimming with life and love. He used to make me think of a
humming-bird in a garden--and now all I have left of him is my small
chest of toys and trinkets and baby-clothes. God, I know, will be good
to that lonely little newcomer in His world of the statelier dead, in
His gallery of whispering ghosts. Oh, be good to him, God! Be good to
him, or You shall be no God of mine! I can't think of him as dead, as
going out like a candle, as melting into nothingness as the little
bones under their six feet of earth molder away. But my laddie is
gone. And I must not be morbid. As Peter once said, misery loves
company, but the company is apt to seek more convivial quarters. Yet
something has gone out of my life, and that something drives me back
to my Dinkie and my Poppsy with a sort of fierceness in my hunger to
love them, to make the most of them.

Gershom, who has been giving Poppsy a daily lesson at home, has just
inquired why she shouldn't be sent to school along with Dinkie. And
her father has agreed. It gave me the wretched feeling, for a moment
or two, that they were conspiring to take my last baby away from me.
But I have to bow to the fact that I no longer possess one, since
Poppsy announced her preference, the other day, for a doll "with real
livings in it." She begins to show as fixed an aversion to baby-talk
as that entertained by old Doctor Johnson himself, and no longer
yearns to "do yidin on the team-tars," as she used to express it. The
word "birthday" is still "birfday" with her, and "water" is still
"wagger," but she now religiously eschews all such reiterative
diminutives as "roundy-poundy" and "Poppsy-Woppsy" and "beddy-bed."
She has even learned, after much effort, to convert her earlier "keam
of feet" into the more l