ll have to begin at the last of your letter, and work toward the
beginning, for it is of my sad children that I must speak
first--although my pen is eager to talk about you, and what your letter
has meant to me.

The sad children are no longer sad. Against the sand-hills they are
like rose petals blown by the wind. Their pink aprons tied in the back
with great bows, and the pink ribbons have transformed them, so that,
except for their blank eyes, they might be any other little girls in
the world.

I have taught them several of the pretty songs; you should hear their
piping voices--and with their picture books and their gardens, they are
very busy and happy indeed.

Their mother is positively illumined by the change her young folks.
Never in her life has she seen any country but this one of charred
pines and sand. I find her bending over the Cinderella book, liking
it, and liking the children's little gardens.

"We ain't never had no flower garden," she confided to me. "Jim he
ain't had time, and I ain't had time, and I ain't never had no luck
nohow."

But the boy still means the most to me. And you have found the reason.
It isn't what I am doing for him, it is what he is doing for me. If
you could see his eyes! They are a boy's eyes now, not those of a
little wild animal. He is beginning to read the simple books you sent.
We began with "Mother Goose," and I gave him first "The King of France
and Forty Thousand Men." The "Oranges and Lemons" song carried on the
Dick Whittington atmosphere which he had liked in my poem, with its
bells of Old Bailey and Shoreditch. He'll know his London before I get
through with him.

But we've struck even a deeper note. One Sunday I was moved to take
out with me your father's old Bible. There's a rose between its
leaves, kept for a talisman against the blue devils which sometimes get
me in their grip. Well, I took the old Bible out to our little
amphitheater in the pines, and read, what do you think? Not the Old
Testament stories.

I read the Beatitudes, and my boy listened, and when I had finished, he
asked, "What is blessed? And who said that?"

I told him, and brought back to myself in the telling the vision of
myself as a boy. Oh, how far I have drifted from the dreams of that
boy! And if it had not been for you I should never have turned back.
And now this boy in the pines, and the boy who was I are learning
together, step by step. I am trying to forget t