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in question. You and I used to be friends (intermittently), and though there are one or two details in our past intercourse that might better be expunged, still I don't see why we should let them upset our entire relationship. Can't we be sensible and expunge them?

The fire has brought out such a lot of unexpected kindliness and charity, I wish it might bring out a little from you. You see, Sandy, I know you well. You may pose to the world as being gruff and curt and ungracious and scientific and inhuman and SCOTCH, but you can't fool me. My newly trained psychological eye has been upon you for ten months, and I have applied the Binet test. You are really kind and sympathetic and wise and forgiving and big, so please be at home the next time I come to see you, and we will perform a surgical operation. upon Time and amputate five months.

Do you remember the Sunday afternoon we ran away, and what a nice time we had? It is now the day after that. SALLIE MCBRIDE.

The Dochther

is ashleep and I can't be lettin' ye oop.

P.S. If I condescend to call upon you again, please condescend to see me, for I assure you I won't try more than once! Also, I assure you that I won't drip tears on your counterpane or try to kiss your hand, as I hear one admiring lady did..

John Grier Home, Thursday.

Dear Enemy:

You see, I'm feeling very friendly toward you this moment. When I call you "MacRae" I don't like you, and when I call you "Enemy" I do.

Sadie Kate delivered your note (as an afterthought). And it's a very credit

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Those must have been ten terribly incoherent pages I dashed off to you last week. Did you respect my command to destroy that letter? I should not care to have it appear in my collected correspondence. I know that my state of mind is disgraceful, shocking, scandalous, but one really can't help the way one feels. It is usually considered a pleasant sensation to be engaged, but, oh, it is nothing compared with the wonderful untrammeled, joyous, free sensation of being un-engaged! I have had a terribly unstable. feeling these last few months, and now at last I am settled. No one ever looked forward to spinsterhood more thankfully than I.

Our fire, I have come to believe, was providential. It was sent from heaven to clear the way for a new John Grier. We are already deep in plans for cottages. I favor gray stucco, Betsy leans to brick, and Percy, half-timber. I don't know what our poor doctor would prefer; olive green with a mansard roof appears to be his taste.

With ten different kitchens to practise in, won't our children learn how to cook! I am already looking about for ten loving house mothers to put in charge. I think, in fact, I'll search for eleven, in order to have one for Sandy. He's as pathetically in need of a little mothering as any of the chicks. It must be pretty dispiriting to come home every night to the ministrations of Mrs. McGur-rk.

How I do not like that woman! She has with complacent firmness told me four different times that the dochther was ashleep and not wantin' to be dishturbed. I have n't set eyes on him yet, and I have just about finished being polite. However, I will waive judgment until to-morrow at four, when I am to pay a short, unexciting call of half an hour. He made. the appointment himself, and if she tells me again that he is ashleep, I shall give her a gentle push and tip her over (she's very fat and unstable) and, planting a foot firmly on her stomach, pursue my way tranquilly in and up. Luellen, formerly chauffeur, chambermaid, and gardener, is now also trained nurse. I am eager to see how he looks in a white cap and apron.

The mail has just come, with a letter from Mrs. Bretland, telling how happy they are to have the children. She inclosed their first photograph-all packed in a governess cart, with Clifford proudly holding the reins, and a groom at the pony's head. How is that for three late inmates of the John Grier Home? It's all very inspiring when I think of their futures, but a trifle sad when I remember their poor father, and how he worked himself to death for those three chicks who are going to forget him. The Bretlands will do their best to accomplish that. They are jealous of any outside influence and want to make the babies wholly theirs. After all, I think the natural way is best-for each family to produce its own children, and keep them.

Friday.

I saw the doctor to-day. He's a pathetic sight, consisting mostly of bandages. Somehow or other we got our misunderstandings all made up. Is n't it dreadful the way two human beings, both endowed with fair powers of speech, can manage to convey nothing of their psychological processes to each other? I have n't understood his mental attitude from the first, and he even yet does n't understand mine. This grim reticence that we

Northern people struggle so hard to maintain! I don't know after all but that the excitable Southern safety-valve method is the best.

But, Judy, such a dreadful thing-do you remember last year when he visited that psychopathic institution, and stayed ten days, and I made such a silly fuss about it? Oh, my dear, the impossible things I do! He went to attend his wife's funeral. She died there in the institution. Mrs. McGurk knew it all the time, and might have added it to the rest of her news, but she did n't.

He told me all about her, very sweetly. The poor man for years and years has undergone a terrible strain, and I fancy her death is a blessed relief. He confesses that he knew at the time of his marriage that he ought not to marry her, he knew all about her nervous instability; but he thought, being a doctor, that he could. overcome it, and she was beautiful! He gave up his city practice and came to the country on her account. And then after the little girl's birth she went all to pieces, and he had to "put her away," to use Mrs. McGurk's phrase. The child is six now, a sweet, lovely little thing to look at, but, I judge from what he said, quite abnormal. He has a trained nurse with her always. Just think of all that tragedy looming over our poor patient good doctor, for he is patient, despite being the most impatient man that ever lived!

Thank Jervis for his letter. He's a dear man, and I 'm glad to see him getting his deserts. What fun we are going to have when you get back to Shadywell, and we lay our plans for a new John Grier! I feel as though I had spent this past year learning, and am now just ready to begin. We'll turn this into the nicest orphan-asylum that ever lived. I'm so absurdly happy at the prospect that I start in the morning with a spring, and go about my various businesses singing inside.

The John Grier Home sends its blessing to the two best friends it ever had! Addio!

SALLIE.

John Grier Home, Saturday at half-past six in the morning!

My dearest Enemy:

"Some day soon something nice is going to happen."

Were n't you surprised when you woke up this morning and remembered the truth? I was! I could n't think for about two minutes what made me SO happy.

It's not light yet, but I 'm wide awake. and excited and having to write to you. I shall despatch this note by the first to-betrusted little orphan who appears, and it will go up on your breakfast tray along with your oatmeal.

Dr. RMER

I shall follow very promptly at four o'clock this afternoon. Do you think. Mrs. McGurk will ever countenance the scandal if I stay two hours, and no orphan for a chaperon?

It was in all good faith, Sandy, that I promised not to kiss your hand or drip tears on the counterpane, but I'm afraid I did both-or worse! Positively, I did n't suspect how much I cared for you till I crossed the threshold and saw you propped up against the pillows, all covered with bandages, and your hair singed off. You are a sight! If I love you now, when fully one third of you is in plaster of Paris and surgical dressing, you can imagine how I'm going to love you when it's all you!

But my dear, dear Robin, what a foolish man you are! How should I ever have dreamed all these months that you

were caring for me when you acted so abominably SCOTCH? With most men, behavior like yours would not be considered a mark of affection. I wish you had just given me a glimmering of an idea of the truth, and maybe you would have saved us both a few heartaches.

But we must n't be looking back; we must look forward and be grateful. The two happiest things in life are going to be ours, a friendly marriage and work that we love.

Yesterday, after leaving you, I walked back to the asylum sort of dazed. I wanted to get by myself and think, but instead of being by myself, I had to have Betsy and Percy and Mrs. Livermore for dinner (already invited) and then go down and talk to the children. Friday night-social evening. They had a lot of new records for the phonograph, given by Mrs. Livermore, and I had to sit politely and listen to them. And, my dearyou'll think this funny-the last thing they played was "John Anderson, my jo, John, and suddenly I found myself crying! I had to snatch up the nearest orphan and hug her hard, with my head buried in her shoulder, to keep them all from seeing.

John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a canty day, John,

We 've had wi' ane anither;
Now we maun totter doun, John,
But hand in hand we 'll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.

I wonder, when we are old and bent and tottery, can you and I look back, with no regrets, on mony a canty day we 've had wi' ane anither? It's nice to look forward to, is n't it—a life of work and play and little daily adventures side by side with somebody you love? I'm not afraid of the future any more. I don't mind growing old with you, Sandy. "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in."

The reason I've grown to love these orphans is because they need me so, and

that's the reason— at least one of the reasons I've grown to love you. You're a pathetic figure of a man, my dear, and since you won't make yourself comfortable, you must be made comfortable.

We'll build a house on the hillside just beyond the asylum-how does a yellow Italian villa strike you, or preferably a pink one? Anyway, it won't be green. And it won't have a mansard roof. And we 'll have a big cheerful living-room, all fireplace and windows and view, and no McGURK. Poor old thing! won't she be in a temper and cook you a dreadful dinner when she hears the news! But we won't tell her for a long, long timeor anybody else. It's too scandalous a proceeding right on top of my own broken engagement. I wrote to Judy last night, and with unprecedented self-control I never let fall so much as a hint. I'm growing Scotch mysel'!

Perhaps I did n't tell you the exact truth, Sandy, when I said I had n't known how much I cared. I think it came to me the night the John Grier burned. When you were up under that blazing roof, and for the half hour that followed, when we did n't know whether or not you would live, I can't tell you what agonies I went through. It seemed to me, if you did go, that I would never get over it all my life; that somehow to have let the best

friend I ever had pass away with a dreadful chasm of misunderstanding between us-well-I could n't wait for the moment when I should be allowed to see you and talk out all that I have been shutting inside me for five months. And thenyou know that you gave strict orders to keep me out; and it hurt me dreadfully. How should I suspect that you really wanted to see me more than any of the others, and that it was just that terrible Scotch moral sense that was holding you back? You are a very good actor, Sandy. But, my dear, if ever in our lives again we have the tiniest little cloud of a misunderstanding, let's promise not to shut it up inside ourselves, but to talk.

Last night, after they all got off,early, I am pleased to say, since the chicks no longer live at home,-I came up-stairs and finished my letter to Judy, and then I looked at the telephone and struggled with temptation. I wanted to call up 505 and say good night to you. But I did n't dare. I'm still quite respectably bashful! So, as the next best thing to talking with you, I got out Burns and read him for an hour. I dropped asleep with all those Scotch love-songs running in my head, and here I am at daybreak writing them to you.

THE END

Good-by, Robin lad, I lo'e you weel.

SALLIE.

Open-air Schools for Normal Children

By HAZEL H. ADLER

Lead your child out into Nature. Tutor him on the hilltop and in the valley. There will he listen better, and the sense of freedom will give him more strength to overcome difficulties.- PESTALOZZI.

THE

HE responsibility for education has gradually been shifting from the shoulders of the individual child to those of the physician and the educator. The dunce-cap has been relegated to the scrapheap. Backwardness is no longer considered a disgrace or misdemeanor, but the result of specific physical causes. We have learned to deal scientifically and sympathetically with the defective and the delinquent, to act with chivalry toward the weak and the unfit; but the rights of the great majority of average children, which have clamored less dramatically for our comprehension, have been left groping on

the way.

Fresh air and freedom are theoretically recognized as the heritage of childhood. But the fact remains that, proportionately as the preventive and curative properties of the open air have been more and more widely demonstrated in medicine, it has come to be excluded in a greater and greater degree from the ventilation of our school-rooms, to be replaced by an increasingly complex mechanical system, until to open a window in winter is to discredit the entire system. At the same time we have been forcing our children to sit for long hours at their desks in a closed school-room, with a growing burden of extra work to keep them confined at home, so that all that is left them of their heritage must be crowded into one or two hours at the fag-end of day.

The open-air school movement for

sickly and anemic children, which has taken deep root in Germany, England, and America, with its emphasis on the physical basis of mentality and its simplification and vitalization of the school curriculum, has done more to open the eyes of interested people to some of the misconceptions of our common education than ten or twenty years of gradual evolution. Designed to meet the requirements of special classes, open-air schools have come to bear in themselves a formidable challenge to the old and established order, and to point the way definitely to the accomplishment of certain ideals in education that have long been trembling on the brink of perception.

The original experiment was undertaken eleven years ago in a vast wood on the outskirts of the town of Charlottenburg, Germany. The children were chosen from among those in the public schools whose mental retardation seemed due to physical debility, and the object was primarily to build up their bodies while affording them an opportunity to learn at the same time, if possible.

The buildings consisted of rude sheds open to the air on one, two, and three sides. The children came at eight o'clock in the morning, and were kept well fed and clean. Instruction was reduced to the most practical and necessary subjects, and was given in half-hour periods, with five-minute intervals for exercise between. The actual study covered only a stretch of two consecutive hours, the rest of the day being given over to teaching the children how to observe and use their powers of reasoning and adaptation.

Excursions were made in connection with geography, history, and nature

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