page in this red--red devil--I'm glad I've written it at
last--of a book is the fifth. It says:

"Breakfast--one slice of dry toast, one egg, fruit and a tablespoonful
of baked cereal, small cup of coffee, no sugar, no cream." And me with
two Jersey cows full of the richest cream in Hillsboro, Harpeth Valley,
out in my pasture!

"Dinner, one small lean chop, slice of toast, spinach, green beans and
lettuce salad. No dessert or sweet." The blue-grass in my yard is full
of fat little fryers and I wish I were a sheep if I have to eat lettuce
and spinach for grass. At least I'd have more than one chop inside me
then.

"Supper--slice of toast and an apple." Why the apple? Why supper at all?

Oh, I'm hungry, hungry until I cry in my sleep when I dream about a
muffin! I thought at first that getting out of bed before my eyes are
fairly open and turning myself into a circus actor by doing every kind
of overhand, foot, arm and leg contortion that the mind of cruel man
could invent to torture a human being with, would kill me before I had
been at it a week, but when I read on page sixteen that as soon as all
that horror was over I must jump right into the tub of cold water, I
kicked, metaphorically speaking. And I've been kicking ever since,
literally to keep from freezing.

[Illustration: She shrouds me for the agony]

But as cruel a death as freezing is, it doesn't compare to the tortures
of being melted. Judy administers it to me and her faithful heart is so
wrung with compassion that she perspires almost as much as I do. She
wrings a linen sheet out in a caldron of boiling water and shrouds me
in it for the agony--and then more and more blanket windings envelop me
until I am like the mummy of some Egyptian giantess. I have ice on the
back of my neck and my forehead, and murder for the whole world in my
heart. Once I got so discouraged at the idea of having all this hades
in this life that I mingled tears with the beads of perspiration that
rolled down my cheeks, and she snatched me out of those steaming
grave-clothes in less time than it takes to tell it, soused me in
a tub of cold water, fed me a chicken wing and a hot biscuit and the
information that I was "good-looking enough for _anybody_ to eat up
alive without all this foolishness," all in a very few seconds. Now I
have to beg her to help me and I heard her tell her nephew, who does the
gardening, that she felt like an undertaker with such goings-on. At any
rate,