aid when he looked
at the kangaroo in the circus.

I was sitting by my window quietly sewing the other day (that sentence
alone should reveal to you how many miles I have travelled from your
tutelage) when I overheard one of the children stoutly defending what
I took at first to be my character. The next sentence disabused me--it
was my figure under discussion.

"She's not fat!" averred Topsy. "I'll smack you if you says it
again."

"Well," muttered David, the light of reason being thus forcibly borne
in upon him, "she may not be 'zactly fat, but she's fine and hearty."

[Illustration: NOT FAT, BUT FINE AND HEARTY]

If this is the case, and my mirror all too plainly confirms the
verdict, and the summer has not waned, what will the "last estate of
that woman be," after the winter has passed over her? They tell me
that every one here puts on fat in the cold weather as a kind of
windproof jacket. I enclose a photograph of me on landing, so you may
remember me as I was.

No, you need not worry either over communications in the winter. You
really ought to have an intimate acquaintance with our telegraph
service, after you have, so to speak, subsidized it during the past
three months. It runs in winter as well as summer; and I see no
prospect of its closing if you keep it on such a sound financial
basis. Moreover, the building is devoted to the administration of the
law in all its branches. One half of it is the post and telegraph
office, while the other serves as the jail. The whole structure is
within a stone's throw of the church and school, as if the corrective
institutions of the place believed in intensive cultivation. But to
return to the jail. The walls are very thin, and every sound from it
can be plainly heard in the telegraph office adjoining. Friday morning
the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to
complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry
out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was
to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems
that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss
Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in
competition with the mail steamer's winch rather than with Delilah's
"bawling."

[Illustration: DELILAH BAWLING]

I know all about competition in noises after trying to write in this
house. The ceilings are low and thin, and the walls are near