In two minutes more when this letter is finished I am going to settle
down to a book which I found in the attic. It's entitled, On the Trail,
and sprawled across the front page in a funny little-boy hand:

Jervis Pendleton
if this book should ever roam,
Box its ears and send it home.


He spent the summer here once after he had been ill, when he
was about eleven years old; and he left On the Trail behind.
It looks well read--the marks of his grimy little hands are frequent!
Also in a corner of the attic there is a water wheel and a windmill
and some bows and arrows. Mrs. Semple talks so constantly about him
that I begin to believe he really lives--not a grown man with a silk hat
and walking stick, but a nice, dirty, tousle-headed boy who clatters
up the stairs with an awful racket, and leaves the screen doors open,
and is always asking for cookies. (And getting them, too, if I
know Mrs. Semple!) He seems to have been an adventurous little soul--
and brave and truthful. I'm sorry to think he is a Pendleton;
he was meant for something better.

We're going to begin threshing oats tomorrow; a steam engine
is coming and three extra men.

It grieves me to tell you that Buttercup (the spotted cow with
one horn, Mother of Lesbia) has done a disgraceful thing. She got
into the orchard Friday evening and ate apples under the trees,
and ate and ate until they went to her head. For two days she