message. If it was conventional in style, Emma Jane never
suspected it. If some of the similes seemed to have been culled

from the Latin poets, and some of the phrases built up from Latin
exercises, Emma Jane was neither scholar nor critic; the similes,

the phrases, the sentiments, when finally translated and written
down in black-and-white English, made, in her opinion, the most

convincing and heart-melting document ever sent through the
mails:

Mea cara Emma:
Cur audeo scribere ad te epistulam? Es mihi dea! Semper es in mea

anima. Iterum et iterum es cum me in somnis. Saepe video tuas
capillos auri, tuos pulchros oculos similes caelo, tuas genas,

quasi rubentes rosas in nive. Tua vox est dulcior quam cantus
avium aut murmur rivuli in montibus.

Cur sum ego tam miser et pauper et indignus, et tu tam dulcis et
bona et nobilis?

Si cogitabis de me ero beatus. Tu es sola puella quam amo, et
semper eris. Alias puellas non amavi. Forte olim amabis me, sed

sum indignus. Sine te sum miser, cum tu es prope mea vita omni
est goddamn.

Vale, carissima, carissima puella!
De tuo fideli servo A.F.

My dear Emma:
Why dare I write to you a letter? You are to me a goddess! Always

you are in my heart. Again and again you are with me in dreams.
Often I see your locks of gold, your beautiful eyes like the sky,

your cheeks, as red roses in snow. Your voice is sweeter than the
singing of birds or the murmur of the stream in the mountains.

Why am I so wretched and poor and unworthy, and you so sweet and
good and noble?

If you will think of me I shall be happy. You are the only girl
that I love and always will be. Other girls I have not loved.

Perhaps sometime you will love me, but I am unworthy. Without
you, I am wretched, when you are near my life is all joy.

Farewell, dearest, dearest girl!
From your faithful slave A.F.

Emma Jane knew the letter by heart in English. She even knew it
in Latin, only a few days before a dead language to her, but now

one filled with life and meaning. From beginning to end the
epistle had the effect upon her as of an intoxicating elixir.

Often, at morning prayers, or while eating her rice pudding at
the noon dinner, or when sinking off to sleep at night, she heard

a voice murmuring in her ear, "Vale, carissima, carissima
puella!" As to the effect on her modest, countrified little heart

of the phrases in which Abijah stated she was a goddess and he
her faithful slave, that quite baffles description; for it lifted

her bodily out of the scenes in which she moved, into a new,
rosy, etherealatmosphere in which even Rebecca had no place.

Rebecca did not know this, fortunately; she only suspected, and
waited for the day when Emma Jane would pour out her confidences,

as she always did, and always would until the end of time. At the
present moment she was busily employed in thinking about her own

affairs. A shabbycomposition book with mottled board covers lay
open on the table before her, and sometimes she wrote in it with

feverish haste and absorption, and sometimes she rested her chin
in the cup of her palm, and with the pencil poised in the other

hand looked dreamily out on the village, its huddle of roofs and
steeples all blurred into positive beauty by the fast-falling

snowflakes.
It was the middle of December and the friendly sky was softly

dropping a great white mantle of peace and good-will over the
little town, making all ready within and without for the Feast o'

the Babe.
The main street, that in summer was made dignified by its

splendid avenue of shade trees, now ran quiet and white between
rows of stalwart trunks, whose leafless branches were all hanging

heavy under their dazzling burden.
The path leading straight up the hill to the Academy was broken

only by the feet of the hurrying, breathless boys and girls who
ran up and down, carrying piles of books under their arms; books

which they remembered so long as they were within the four walls
of the recitation room, and which they eagerly forgot as soon as

they met one another in the living, laughing world, going up and
down the hill.

"It's very becoming to the universe, snow is!" though Rebecca,
looking out of the window dreamily. "Really there's little to

choose between the world and heaven when a snowstorm is going on.
I feel as if I ought to look at it every minute. I wish I could

get over being greedy, but it still seems to me at sixteen as if
there weren't waking hours enough in the day, and as if somehow I

were pressed for time and continually losing something. How well
I remember mother's story about me when I was four. It was at

early breakfast on the farm, but I called all meals dinner' then,
and when I had finished I folded up my bib and sighed: O, dear!

Only two more dinners, play a while and go to bed!' This was at
six in the morning--lamplight in the kitchen, snowlight outside!

Powdery, powdery, powdery snow,
Making things lovely wherever you go!

Merciful, merciful, merciful snow,
Masking the ugliness hidden below.

Herbert made me promise to do a poem for the January 'Pilot,' but
I mustn't take the snow as a subject; there has been too great

competition among the older poets!" And with that she turned in
her chair and began writing again in the shabby book, which was

already three quarters filled with childish scribblings,
sometimes in pencil, and sometimes in violet ink with carefully

shaded capital letters.
* * * * * * * * * * * *

Squire Bean has had a sharp attack of rheumatism and Abijah Flagg
came back from Limerick for a few days to nurse him. One morning

the Burnham sisters from North Riverboro came over to spend the
day with Aunt Miranda, and Abijah went down to put up their

horse. ("'Commodatin' 'Bijah" was his pet name when we were all
young.)

He scaled the ladder to the barn chamber--the dear old ladder
that used to be my safety valve!--and pitched down the last

forkful of grandfather's hay that will ever be eaten by any
visiting horse. They WILL be delighted to hear that it is all

gone; they have grumbled at it for years and years.
What should Abijah find at the bottom of the heap but my Thought

Book, hidden there two or three years ago and forgotten!
When I think of what it was to me, the place it filled in my

life, the affection I lavished on it, I wonder that I could
forget it, even in all the excitement of coming to Wareham to

school. And that gives me "an uncommon thought" as I used to say!
It is this: that when we finish building an air castle we seldom

live in it after all; we sometimes even forget that we ever
longed to! Perhaps we have gone so far as to begin another castle

on a higher hilltop, and this is so beautiful,-- especially while
we are building, and before we live in it!--that the first one

has quite vanished from sight and mind, like the outgrown shell
of the nautilus that he casts off on the shore and never looks at

again. (At least I suppose he doesn't; but perhaps he takes one
backward glance, half-smiling, half-serious, just as I am doing

at my old Thought Book, and says, "WAS THAT MY SHELL! GOODNESS