heart would break. I know not how long I lay there. All night,
perhaps. It may have been yesterday when I flew so fast through the
green fields. I know nothing about time here. I have come to write to
you again. It is night again. My paper is all wet with my tears. O, if
my mother were only here to kiss me to sleep!

* * * * *

Dear Children: To-day something pleasant has happened. I have found a
little room I never saw before, away off in the corner of a long
entry; and will you believe it? there are the remains of a wood fire
in it--real ashes, which I could blow about with my breath, only I do
not like to disturb them, and a piece of burnt brand. Some one must
have lived in this room, and perhaps not so very long ago. It is hung
with flowered chintz curtains, like those around my bed at home. It
made me so happy to see them, I kissed the flowers and the buds on
them; and yet it made me sad, too, I longed so for my own little
room. I lifted the curtains all around the walls, hoping to find a
window, and found a little one in a corner, but the shutters were
closed. I thought that it might overlook the lake and the hills, and
that perhaps some little girl had once sat there with the soft breeze
blowing upon her, and she had seen the dancing waves of the lake, and
far across it our little brown house, which I would rather see now
than the glancing waters I once loved so well. I pushed and pulled; I
looked for a spring, and ran over all kinds of strange words in hopes
to find one that would open it; but all in vain. There was no bar
across the shutter, and yet it was firmly closed. Then I looked around
the room. There was a small statue carved in wood of a boy, with an
extinguished torch in one hand, stretching out the other as if he were
groping in the darkness. There was another carving in wood of a child