Daddy Long Legs

Good night, Granny.

I love you dearly.

Judy

The Ides of March

Dear D.-L.-L., I am studying Latin prose composition. I have been studying it. I

shall be studying it. I shall be about to have been studying it. My

re-examination comes the 7th hour next Tuesday, and I am going to pass

or BUST. So you may expect to hear from me next, whole and happy and

free from conditions, or in fragments.

I will write a respectable letter when it's over. Tonight I have a

pressing engagement with the Ablative Absolute.

Yours--in evident haste

J. A.

26th March

Mr. D.-L.-L. Smith,

SIR: You never answer any questions; you never show the slightest

interest in anything I do. You are probably the horridest one of all

those horrid Trustees, and the reason you are educating me is, not

because you care a bit about me, but from a sense of Duty.

I don't know a single thing about you. I don't even know your name.

It is very uninspiring writing to a Thing. I haven't a doubt but that

you throw my letters into the waste-basket without reading them.

Hereafter I shall write only about work.

My re-examinations in Latin and geometry came last week. I passed them

both and am now free from conditions.

Yours truly,

Jerusha Abbott

2nd April Dear Daddy-Long-Legs, I am a BEAST.

Please forget about that dreadful letter I sent you last week--I was

feeling terribly lonely and miserable and sore-throaty the night I

wrote. I didn't know it, but I was just sickening for tonsillitis and

grippe and lots of things mixed. I'm in the infirmary now, and have

been here for six days; this is the first time they would let me sit up

and have a pen and paper. The head nurse is very bossy. But I've been

thinking about it all the time and I shan't get well until you forgive

me.

Here is a picture of the way I look, with a bandage tied around my head

in rabbit's ears.

Doesn't that arouse your sympathy? I am having sublingual gland

swelling. And I've been studying physiology all the year without ever

hearing of sublingual glands. How futile a thing is education!

I can't write any more; I get rather shaky when I sit up too long.

Please forgive me for being impertinent and ungrateful. I was badly

brought up.

Yours with love,

Judy Abbott

THE INFIRMARY

4th April

Dearest Daddy-Long-Legs,

Yesterday evening just towards dark, when I was sitting up in bed

looking out at the rain and feeling awfully bored with life in a great

institution, the nurse appeared with a long white box addressed to me,

and filled with the LOVELIEST pink rosebuds. And much nicer still, it

contained a card with a very polite message written in a funny little

uphill back hand (but one which shows a great deal of character). Thank

you, Daddy, a thousand times. Your flowers make the first real, true

present I ever received in my life. If you want to know what a baby I

am I lay down and cried because I was so happy.