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Dear Enemy

Page 77

Whatever can I do with these little ones? I think and think and think

about them. I can't place them out, and it does seem too awful to bring

them up here; for as good as we are going to be when we get ourselves

made over, still, after all, we are an institution, and our inmates are

just little incubator chicks. They don't get the individual, fussy care

that only an old hen can give.

There is a lot of interesting news that I might have been telling you,

but my new little family has driven everything out of my mind.

Bairns are certain joy, but nae sma' care.

Yours ever,

SALLIE. P.S. Don't forget that you are coming to visit me next week.

P.S. II. The doctor, who is ordinarily so scientific and unsentimental,

has fallen in love with Allegra. He didn't so much as glance at her

tonsils; he simply picked her up in his arms and hugged her. Oh, she is

a little witch! Whatever is to become of her?

June 22. My dear Judy:

I may report that you need no longer worry as to our inadequate fire

protection. The doctor and Mr. Witherspoon have been giving the

matter their gravest attention, and no game yet devised has proved so

entertaining and destructive as our fire drill.

The children all retire to their beds and plunge into alert slumber.

Fire alarm sounds. They spring up and into their shoes, snatch the top

blanket from their beds, wrap it around their imaginary nightclothes,

fall into line, and trot to the hall and stairs.

Our seventeen little tots in the nursery are each in charge of an

Indian, and are bundled out, shrieking with delight. The remaining

Indians, so long as there is no danger of the roof falling, devote

themselves to salvage. On the occasion of our first drill, Percy in

command, the contents of a dozen clothes lockers were dumped into sheets

and hurled out of the windows. I usurped dictatorship just in time to

keep the pillows and mattresses from following. We spent hours resorting

those clothes, while Percy and the doctor, having lost all interest

strolled up to the camp with their pipes.

Our future drills are to be a touch less realistic. However, I am

pleased to tell you that, under the able direction of Fire Chief

Witherspoon, we emptied the building in six minutes and twenty-eight

seconds.

That baby Allegra has fairy blood in her veins. Never did this

institution harbor such a child, barring one that Jervis and I know of.

She has completely subjugated the doctor. Instead of going about his

visits like a sober medical man, he comes down to my library hand in

hand with Allegra, and for half an hour at a time crawls about on a rug,

pretending he's a horse, while the bonnie wee lassie sits on his back

and kicks. You know, I am thinking of putting a card in the paper:

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