We've done it every year
for nineteen years. The first Saturday there was twenty-seven
of us, without counting the girls; there's only three of us now,
and the girls are gone. We drug him to sleep, or he would go wild;
then he's all right for another year--thinks she's with him till the
last three or four days come round; then he begins to look for her,
and gets out his poor old letter, and we come and ask him to read it
to us. Lord, she was a darling!"
A HELPLESS SITUATION
Once or twice a year I get a letter of a certain pattern,
a pattern that never materially changes, in form and substance,
yet I cannot get used to that letter--it always astonishes me.
It affects me as the locomotive always affects me: I saw to myself,
"I have seen you a thousand times, you always look the same way,
yet you are always a wonder, and you are always impossible; to contrive
you is clearly beyond human genius--you can't exist, you don't exist,
yet here you are!"
I have a letter of that kind by me, a very old one. I yearn to print it,
and where is the harm? The writer of it is dead years ago, no doubt,
and if I conceal her name and address--her this-world address
--I am sure her shade will not mind. And with it I wish to print
the answer which I wrote at the time but probably did not send.
If it went--which is not likely--it went in the form of a copy,
for I find the original still here, pigeonholed with the said letter.
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