Dear Daughter Phyllis: There's a real feel of fall in the air to-day, though it's still hot as ever round noontimes. All week the house has seemed like a church with your sister and the twins off at school and I'm as sorry as they are that they have to get down to books again. I declare I feel a good deal like them with the Chautauqua Study Circle starting again and the Ladies Missionary Society taking up the subject of China.
We chose the Orient mostly because of you, Phyllis, and we want you should visit the Missionary Society of that American Community Church, if they've got one, and ask the ladies what they'd suggest for a study course. Likely they'd know a few real nice heathen we could get intarested in, too, for I'd a heap rather sew for a cute little Chinese girl. I could hear about than to be stitching away for a lot of savages the land knows where. What about your own_ servants, Phyllis? Has your amah got proper winter flannels or should we be sewing up some good warm clothes for the Swatow sufferers? That was some disaster. Did you see the ruins, or can't you get there handy by motor?
We have two new teachers in town this term, boarding with the Cummingses on our corner, and, as Madge says, they sure can instruct the population in jam. Why really it don't seem as if they should have been let graduate from High School yet, they look so young. And the way they dress, too, more like the lady tennis champions in the Sunday pictorial supplements than like respectable educators.
At the Peach Festival down at the church Wednesday night I got Principal Baldwin off in a corner and told him I wanted to have a real serious talk with him. "About Beatrice?" says he. She is developing very rapidly these days and is becoming a real personality." (As if I didn't know that much about my own daughter!) 'I consider she is very fortunate in having Miss Prescott for her history and English this year."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.