Don't you think it would be interesting if you really could read the story of your life--written perfectly truthfully by an omniscient author? And suppose you could only read it on this condition: that you would never forget it, but would have to go through life knowing ahead of time exactly how everything you did would turn out, and foreseeing to the exact hour the time when you would die. How many people do you suppose would have the courage to read it then? or how many could suppress their curiosity sufficiently to escape from reading it, even at the price of having to live without hope and without surprises?

Life is monotonous enough at best; you have to eat and sleep about so often. But imagine how DEADLY monotonous it would be if nothing unexpected could happen between meals. Mercy! Daddy, there's a blot, but I'm on the third page and I can't begin a new sheet.

I'm going on with biology again this year--very interesting subject; we're studying the alimentary system at present. You should see how sweet a cross-section of the duodenum of a cat is under the microscope.

Also we've arrived at philosophy--interesting but evanescent. I prefer biology where you can pin the subject under discussion to a board.

There's another! And another! This pen is weeping copiously. Please excuse its tears.

Do you believe in free will? I do--unreservedly. I don't agree at all with the philosophers who think that every action is the absolutely inevitable and automatic resultant of an aggregation of remote causes.

That's the most immoral doctrine I ever heard--n.o.body would be to blame for anything. If a man believed in fatalism, he would naturally just sit down and say, 'The Lord's will be done,' and continue to sit until he fell over dead.

I believe absolutely in my own free will and my own power to accomplish--and that is the belief that moves mountains. You watch me become a great author! I have four chapters of my new book finished and five more drafted.

This is a very abstruse letter--does your head ache, Daddy? I think we'll stop now and make some fudge. I'm sorry I can't send you a piece; it will be unusually good, for we're going to make it with real cream and three b.u.t.ter b.a.l.l.s.

Yours affectionately, Judy

PS. We're having fancy dancing in gymnasium cla.s.s. You can see by the accompanying picture how much we look like a real ballet. The one at the end accomplishing a graceful pirouette is me--I mean I.

26th December

My Dear, Dear, Daddy,

Haven't you any sense? Don't you KNOW that you mustn't give one girl seventeen Christmas presents? I'm a Socialist, please remember; do you wish to turn me into a Plutocrat?

Think how embarra.s.sing it would be if we should ever quarrel! I should have to engage a moving-van to return your gifts.

I am sorry that the necktie I sent was so wobbly; I knit it with my own hands (as you doubtless discovered from internal evidence). You will have to wear it on cold days and keep your coat b.u.t.toned up tight.

Thank you, Daddy, a thousand times. I think you're the sweetest man that ever lived--and the foolishest!

Judy

Here's a four-leaf clover from Camp McBride to bring you good luck for the New Year.

9th January

Do you wish to do something, Daddy, that will ensure your eternal salvation? There is a family here who are in awfully desperate straits. A mother and father and four visible children--the two older boys have disappeared into the world to make their fortune and have not sent any of it back. The father worked in a gla.s.s factory and got consumption--it's awfully unhealthy work--and now has been sent away to a hospital. That took all their savings, and the support of the family falls upon the oldest daughter, who is twenty-four. She dressmakes for $1.50 a day (when she can get it) and embroiders centrepieces in the evening. The mother isn't very strong and is extremely ineffectual and pious. She sits with her hands folded, a picture of patient resignation, while the daughter kills herself with overwork and responsibility and worry; she doesn't see how they are going to get through the rest of the winter--and I don't either. One hundred dollars would buy some coal and some shoes for three children so that they could go to school, and give a little margin so that she needn't worry herself to death when a few days pa.s.s and she doesn't get work.

You are the richest man I know. Don't you suppose you could spare one hundred dollars? That girl deserves help a lot more than I ever did.

I wouldn't ask it except for the girl; I don't care much what happens to the mother--she is such a jelly-fish.

The way people are for ever rolling their eyes to heaven and saying, 'Perhaps it's all for the best,' when they are perfectly dead sure it's not, makes me enraged. Humility or resignation or whatever you choose to call it, is simply impotent inertia. I'm for a more militant religion!

We are getting the most dreadful lessons in philosophy--all of Schopenhauer for tomorrow. The professor doesn't seem to realize that we are taking any other subject. He's a queer old duck; he goes about with his head in the clouds and blinks dazedly when occasionally he strikes solid earth. He tries to lighten his lectures with an occasional witticism--and we do our best to smile, but I a.s.sure you his jokes are no laughing matter. He spends his entire time between cla.s.ses in trying to figure out whether matter really exists or whether he only thinks it exists.

I'm sure my sewing girl hasn't any doubt but that it exists!

Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste-basket. I can see myself that it's no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes that, what WOULD be the judgment of a critical public?

Later

I address you, Daddy, from a bed of pain. For two days I've been laid up with swollen tonsils; I can just swallow hot milk, and that is all.

'What were your parents thinking of not to have those tonsils out when you were a baby?' the doctor wished to know. I'm sure I haven't an idea, but I doubt if they were thinking much about me.

Yours, J. A.

Next morning

I just read this over before sealing it. I don't know WHY I cast such a misty atmosphere over life. I hasten to a.s.sure you that I am young and happy and exuberant; and I trust you are the same. Youth has nothing to do with birthdays, only with ALIVEDNESS of spirit, so even if your hair is grey, Daddy, you can still be a boy.

Affectionately, Judy

12th Jan.

Dear Mr. Philanthropist,

Your cheque for my family came yesterday. Thank you so much! I cut gymnasium and took it down to them right after luncheon, and you should have seen the girl's face! She was so surprised and happy and relieved that she looked almost young; and she's only twenty-four. Isn't it pitiful?

Anyway, she feels now as though all the good things were coming together. She has steady work ahead for two months--someone's getting married, and there's a trousseau to make.

'Thank the good Lord!' cried the mother, when she grasped the fact that that small piece of paper was one hundred dollars.

'It wasn't the good Lord at all,' said I, 'it was Daddy-Long-Legs.'

(Mr. Smith, I called you.)

'But it was the good Lord who put it in his mind,' said she.

'Not at all! I put it in his mind myself,' said I.

But anyway, Daddy, I trust the good Lord will reward you suitably. You deserve ten thousand years out of purgatory.

Yours most gratefully, Judy Abbott