Flynn and Hannah White, so they couldn't. We were quite
disappointed, but perhaps she won't send for us next time.

[Illustration: Tom Eddy and Eugene Stone, "Uncle David Dudley Field"]

_May._--Grandmother is teaching me how to knit some mittens now, but if
I ever finish them it will be through much tribulation, the way they
have to be raveled out and commenced over again. I think I shall know
how to knit when I get through, if I never know how to do anything else.
Perhaps I shall know how to write, too, for I write all of Grandmother's
letters for her, because it tires her to write too much. I have sorted
my letters to-day and tied them in packages and found I had between 500
and 600. I have had about two letters a week for the past five years and
have kept them all. Father almost always tells me in his letters to read
my Bible and say my prayers and obey Grandmother and stand up straight
and turn out my toes and brush my teeth and be good to my little sister.
I have been practising all these so long I can say, as the young man did
in the Bible when Jesus told him what to do to be saved, "all these have
I kept from my youth up." But then, I lack quite a number of things
after all. I am not always strictly obedient. For instance, I know
Grandmother never likes to have us read the secular part of the _New
York Observer_ on Sunday, so she puts it in the top drawer of the
sideboard until Monday, but I couldn't find anything interesting to read
the other Sunday so I took it out and read it and put it back. The jokes
and stories in it did not seem as amusing as usual so I think I will not
do it again.

Grandfather's favorite paper is the _Boston Christian Register._ He
could not have one of them torn up any more than a leaf of the Bible. He
has barrels of them stored away in the garret.

I asked Grandmother to-day to write a verse for me to keep always and
she wrote a good one: "To be happy and live long the three grand
essentials are: Be busy, love somebody and have high aims." I think,
from all I have noticed about her, that she has had this for her motto
all her life and I don't think Anna and I can do very much better than
to try and follow it too. Grandfather tells us sometimes, when she is
not in the room, that the best thing we can do is to be just as near
like Grandmother as we can possibly be.

_Saturday, May_ 30.--Louisa Field came over to dinner to-day and brought
Allie with her. We had roast chickens for din