RARY HERE BETWEEN ME AND MY MUFF WHILE YOU STAY WRAPPED UP IN THAT BLANKET"

ANICE, comfortably developed heart

may suddenly get so empty that the few interests it does possess rattle around in it in a painful manner, especially if it be a feminine organ. Mine is; and for nearly a year it has ached most of the time, though I have tried hard to ignore it sternly and fill it up with all the odds and ends I could find. This diary has been a help, and I should call it an "odd." Also, it will have to be an "end," for I'll not have more time than to round it off tonight. That's a pun, but I'm so excited I can't help it.

For a time after Jerry left me, Judge Blair, his slightly peeved mother, and forlornly romantic, lost-lover sister, seemed about the greatest bulk I could find to throw into the yawning emptiness, and I feel yet that I ought to make up my mind to adopt the three of them matrimonially.

Then, during the latter part of August, Dickerson Grant presented himself to me for reformation. At many different periods of time many women have tried to reconstruct Dick, and he is extremely obliging about letting them do it to him; but at thirty-eight, with a fascinating and increasing frost on his temples, he remains an object for further exertions of that sort. I put my experience with him down as wreakage, and for several weeks it filled up some little space in my life.

After that crash I turned my attentions with daughterly fervor to father. As a filler of heart acreage, daddy was not a success; for he spends all his waking hours in the library, writing a correct hourly history of the Civil War as he saw it, and to be looked after annoyed him.

"Get married, Jessica," he exploded as he slammed the door of his life in my face. "Marriage is the only anesthetic to a militant woman like you. I'm in the fourth hour of Gettysburg, and don't let me be disturbed further."

LXXXVII-24

"I will; and I won't disturb you again while on this earth," I said with spirit.

And thus it was I was turned out into the world in quest of life interests. Is it any wonder I ran into things, and made debris of some of them? I am a great, tall, husky woman, with dancing red blood in my veins, friendly provocation in my eyes, and many generous propensities. To be safe from the clutches of the devil, I must be kept busy, and from my infancy Jerry has been my profession. My earliest recollections are of tying him up, putting something on him, remembering something for him, and bringing a slice of bread and jam in case he should get hungry.

Jerry was my career; and then I had few enough brains to send him away from my fostering to seek another one for himself.

"Just wait, Jess, until I get a little. more pressure on this angle, and I 'll have the greatest drilling-machine in the world," he begged of me after one of my prods. Jerry has spent most of his income from his depleted family fortunes on bolts and bars and saws and screws that never came to any good end, and has lived on the remnant very shabbily and happily. The Hales have all been lawyers and politicians, and I never shall understand this mechanical twist of Jerry's nature.

"Are you to remain an infant with toys forever?" I asked him, with cold eyes that I could see fairly slashed his.

He did n't answer me, but turned to his work with a shudder I can never forget.

It was the next morning that the Hale house was closed and he was gone. I am the only family that Jerry has had since his mother's death, and he left no word for me.

I shudder when I even mention in ink those weeks that followed. I went limp, and moaned in my solar plexus until my ribs ached.

Then one day when things were at their worst, and I felt that I must have even

185

foolish little Miss Bessie Blair to love savagely, along came dear old Mrs. Buchannan and stiffened my life up for me. She had thought out a plan for diplomatically drawing the different church societies into one competent organization in order to take better and more systematic care of the town's poor, and needed my immediate help. She talked to me about it all the afternoon, and somehow the question of flannels for indigent kiddies and coal to warm old black Mose's rheumatism made me come thrillingly and executively alive again. Once Mrs. Buchannan had seen Jerry kiss me as he swung me over the fence to her back wood-lot when we were blackberry-hunting last June. She has always helped me love him, and kept tea-cakes for him by his mother's receipt ever since she died. When she was young she lost three tiny babies, and the light in her dear old eyes as she asked me for my help made a warm spot in my breast which still glowed in the fragrant, rose-scented early-fall night that drifted in my wide windows. And instead of snubbing ineffective tears of lonely longing into my pillow, I found them dried as my practical self began asking me for advice as to just which ones of my friends with youngsters I had best go to beg last year's flannels for these seventeen small needies who would have to be incased in the few weeks before the snow began to fly.

After half an hour of most executive thinking I began to lose some of my inward hunger and to feel more comfortable as I fed myself all the half-worn children clothes in town. I found myself remembering every garment that my friends' nurseryites had worn last winter, and figuring just how I should wheedle each separate coat, blouse, or pair of small trousers out of their tight-fisted mothers. At last my campaign was entirely constructed, and I felt that I could go to sleep.

"Please, God, find all the kiddies that need stockings for me, and I'll get them. Give me all the odd babies you can to look after. And take care of Jerry as usual. I'll darn all the stockings I can get, and there can't be too many legs for them. I'll get more. There can't be too many kiddies and legs and—”

And then I drifted off into a deliciously funny dream of Jerry and the mockingbird that, while I planned, had been sing

ing a love-song from the tree by my win-
dow into my unappreciative ears, both sit-
ting on a limb, trilling away at a parody
that ran:
"Mits on his fingers,

Socks on his toes,
He shall have trousers,
Wherever he goes."

I truly don't know what I should have done this long Indian summer, which has brooded over Harpeth Valley with a mysterious haze like that of dim cathedral aisles, with never a word from poor Jerry, whom I had sent away in his helplessness from my executive love, if I had n't been too busy blanketing Mapleridge, Tennessee, for the winter to suffer longer than a few hours at a time.

The frosty twilights, with their snap of cool winds and veiled moonlight, have been the worst, and I have sat on the rug before the smoldering logs in the livingroom, where my fingers could insert themselves in a tiny hole that a coal from his pipe had burned in some other of all the autumns when he had been here to crouch beside me, and ached dumbly. In my wretched and mistaken zeal for his arousing I had discredited him to himself, and I knew him well enough to know that the huge man whom all the time I have frantically known sleeps within him would never let him come back to me until somewhere he had made good. And my keen, unwomanly brain told me relentlessly that Jerry's case versus the world would be hopeless, while my very vigorous feminine heart ached again to cradle his helplessness. I don't see how I have endured it at all, and it must have put beacon-prayer lights, like Mrs. Buchannan's, in my eyes that I can never lose.

But lately the days have gone better. The suffering has been less. I have led what I call the life vigorous, and the close of this Christmas eve's day in Mapleridge shows my results. Suppressed love is a dynamo that will turn wheels if properly connected up with faith in God, and when I came home at seven o'clock to-night there was not a missing cheer in a single heart or home in the town. Mrs. Buchannan gave me an exhausted, though hearty, hug as she whispered:

"God bless you, child, and fill your own big heart as full as little Minnie Todd's

stocking or old Mose's tobacco-gourd! Not a cold or hungry soul in Mapleridge this blessed Christmas, and your young energy has done it."

I could n't answer her, but I left her at her door, and came on into my own big, cold, empty home. Daddy has been shut up for three days, wrestling with some dim data about Perryville, and has had his meals and slept in his study. Up to an hour ago he did n't know there was such a thing as peace and good-will on earth, and I did n't dare interrupt him to tell him. The servants have all gone to a meeting over at Crowtown, and I stood at bay with life on my Christmas eve, alone.

With my head held high and my eyes defying tears, I coaxed a glow out of the gray ashes with some oak chips piled under the logs, and crouched on the rug to try to dry and warm my wet boots and skirts. A sleet turned to snow at four o'clock this afternoon, and I have tramped on regardless of it, to be sure that every kiddie's stocking would be full to the rim and running over upon a hearth that had a good fire burning on it. The sleet had covered the whole earth with ice, and by the time I safely landed Mrs. Buchannan at her door, a silent, white blanket was being spread over its glistening treacherousness. As I came up the walk, the wind was groaning and gnashing the branches of the maples together, and angrily ripping apart the low snow-clouds to let gleams of spectral moonlight cast gaunt shadows across the white lawn and about the tall, white pillars that sentinel the front of the porch. I felt that it was an awful night for a woman to be alone even in her own home, and my fingers slipped trembling into the hole in the rug while an answering storm began to mutter in my breast. All day I had been going into poor homes where bread and coal anxieties haunted both doors and windows; but I had left little Mrs. Todd, with the tiny new Todd at her breast, hovering over the good fire Todd had made up just before I came in with Mamie's doll, and the expression in her eyes as she looked up at his rough, incompetent body, which could earn only pittances by long, hard hours out at the lumber mill, was a knife that cut through the sophisticated surface to liberate a vital me, which rose in its wrath with primitive demand. My head fell forward on my knees.

"Take the pain away, please, God!" I prayed. "Let daddy at least come out of his study for Christmas dinner. Keep care of Jerry as usual, and some day give me—"

But just here my prayer was interrupted by a whir at the telephone, which is an institution less than a month old in Mapleridge, held in great awe, and very much feared by all the natives.

"Say, Miss Jess, you better come quick to the station for this live stock of yourn by express," came in the voice of old Bill Hankins, the station-master. "It is liable to freeze to death, 'cause this stove is bust."

"What do you mean, Mr. Hankins?" I demanded in astonishment. "I'm not expecting anything by express. What is it? Tie it up till morning."

"Can't hear you what you say; but come quick, or I'll be liable fer damages that 'll lose me my job. This stove is bust, and I can't hold—say, ketch him—" Then the wire buzzed as he dropped the receiver.

For about two and a half seconds I stood perfectly paralyzed by the situation. Somebody from somewhere had sent me a dog or a cat by express for Christmas, and Bill had been inadequate to handle the situation. The wire was killed by the dropped receiver, so I could n't tell him to take the creature home with him over night. The poor, stupid old man really has held his position for years because everybody in Mapleridge looks after his business for him, and I had just left a turkey beside the bed of his invalid wife. No, I could n't risk having the express company in some way find out that old Bill had let some of their goods get damaged. I did have to stand by him and sign that receipt for my gift to-night. It was well I felt such a responsibility for that animal and Bill.

Calming my perturbation over the unexpected gift, I reviewed the situation. I asked myself what sort of beast a girl would be likely to get for Christmas.

A Persian kitten! I thought first of what I wanted most, and if one of the darlings awaited me at the station, I could carry it in my arms for the half-mile. But the kitten might be a dog. Then, if it happened to be a soft, wiggly puppy, I could carry it; and if it turned out a mastiff, it could walk. I decided to take a rope.