In Mid-Sea.
DEAR FRIEND O' MINE: You asked me to write, and you will think that I have more than kept my
promise when you get this journal of our days at sea. But it has
seemed to me that you might enjoy it all, just as if you were with us,
instead of down among your sand-hills, with your sad children (are they
really sad now?) and Cousin Patty's wedding cakes.
There's quite a party of us. Leila and her father and the Jeliffes and
Colin kept to their original plan of coming in May, and we decided it
would be best to cross at the same time, so there's Aunt Frances and
Grace and Aunt Isabelle, and Porter--and me--ten of us. If you and
Cousin Patty were here, you'd round out a dozen. I wish you were here.
How Cousin Patty would enjoy it--with her lovely enthusiasms, and her
interest in everything. Do give her much love. I shall write to her
when I reach London, for I know she will be traveling with us in
spirit; she said she was going to live in England by proxy this summer,
and I shall help her all I can by sending pictures, and you must tell
her the books to read.
To think that I am on my way to the London of your Dick Whittington! I
call him yours because you made me really see him for the first time.
"There was he an orphan, O, a little lad alone."
And I am to hear all the bells, and to see the things I have always
longed to see! Yet--and I haven't told this to any one but you, Roger
Poole, the thought doesn't bring one little bit of gladness--it isn't
London that I want, or England. I want my garden and my old big house,
and things as they used to be.
But I am sailing fast away from it--the old life into the new!
So far we have had fair weather. It is always best to speak of the
weather first, isn't it?--so that we can have our minds free for other
things. It hasn't been at all rough; even Leila, who isn't a good
sailor, has been able to stay on deck and people are so much interested
in her. She seems such a child for her widow's black. Oh, what
children they were, my boy Barry and his little wife, and yet they were
man and woman, too. Leila has been letting me see some of his letters;
he showed her a side which he never revealed to me, but I am not
jealous. I am only glad that, for her, my boy Barry became a man.