refuse to take
seriously either her ladyship or her arrival. To-night, I'm more
worried about Dinkie, who got at the floor-shellac with which I'd been
furbishing up the bathroom at Casa Grande. He succeeded in giving his
face and hair a very generous coat of it--and I'm hoping against hope
he didn't get too much of it in his little stomach. He seems normal
enough, and in fairly good spirits, but I had to scrub his face with
coal-oil, to get it clean, and his poor little baby-skin is burnt
rather pink.

The winter has broken, the frost is coming out of the ground and the
mud is not adding to our joy in life. Our last load over to the Harris
shack was ferried and tooled through a batter. On the top of it (the
_load_, and not the batter!) I placed Olie's old banjo, for whatever
happens, we mustn't be entirely without music.

Yesterday Dinky-Dunk got Paddy saddled and bridled for me. Paddy
bucked and bit and bolted and sulked and tried to brush his rider off
against the corral posts. But Dinky-Dunk fought it out with him, and
winded him, and mastered him, and made him meek enough for me to slip
up into the saddle. My riding muscles, however, have gone flabby, and
two or three miles, for the first venture, was all I cared to stand.
But I'm glad to know that Paddy can be pressed into service again,
whenever the occasion arises. Poor old Bobs, by the way, keeps looking
at me with a troubled and questioning eye. He seems to know that some
unsettling and untoward event is on the way. When a coyote howled last
night, far off on the sky-line, Bobs poured out his soul in an
answering solo of misery. This morning, when I was pretty busy, he
poked his head between my knees. I had a dozen things calling me, but
I took the time to rub his nose and brush back his ears and tell him
he was the grandest old dog on all God's green earth. And he repaid me
with a look of adoration that put springs under my heels for the rest
of the morning, and came and licked Pee-Wee's bare heels, and later
Poppsy's, when I was giving them their bath.

_Friday the Tenth_

Lady Alicia has arrived. So have her trunks, eleven in number--count
'em!--trunks of queer sizes and shapes, of pigskin and patent leather
and canvas, with gigantic buckles and straps, and all gaudily
initialed and plastered with foreign labels. Her ladyship had to come,
of course, at the very worst time of year, when the mud was at its
muckiest and th