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bathing suits with us. I wonder if she ever heard any faint, far-off echoes of our moonlit petticoatedness.

“But so far our dips have been in the afternoon. And afterwards we have a glorious wallow on sunwarm, golden sands, with the gauzy dunes behind us stretching to the harbour, and the lazy blue sea before us, dotted over with sails that are silver in the magic of the sunlight. Oh, life is good—good—good. In spite of three rejection slips that came today. Those very editors will be asking for my work some day! Meanwhile Aunt Laura is teaching me how to make a certain rich and complicated kind of chocolate cake after a recipe which a friend of hers in Virginia sent her thirty years ago. Nobody in Blair Water has ever been able to get it and Aunt Laura made me solemnly promise I would never reveal it.

“The real name of the cake is Devil’s Food but Aunt Elizabeth will not have it called that.

“I was down seeing Mr. Carpenter this evening. He has been laid up with rheumatism and one can see he is getting old. He was very cranky with the scholars last year and there was some protest against keeping him on, but it was done. Most of the Blair Water people have sense enough to realise that with all his crankiness Mr. Carpenter is a teacher in a thousand.

“‘One can’t teach fools amiably,’ he growled, when the trustees told him there were complaints about his harshness.

“Perhaps it was his rheumatism that made Mr. Carpenter rather crusty over the poems I took to him for criticism. When he read the one I had composed that April night on a hill-top he tossed it back to me—‘a pretty little gossamer thing,’ he said.

“And I had really thought the poem expressed in some measure the enchantment of that evening. How I must have failed!