’T is a pity about that forefinger. Pray get it well enough to handle a
pen, ’t is so long since you’ve written. So you want home matters
reported. Eatable matters of course will be most interesting. Milk and
butter, plenty. Gingerbread (plain), ditto. Gingerbread (fancy), scarce.
Cookies, quiet. Plum-cake, in demand. Snaps, lively. Brown-bread, firm.
White-bread (sliced), dull. Biscuits (hot), brisk. Custard, unsteady.
Preserves not in the market.
What do we do, and what do we talk about? Why, we talk about our cousin
William Henry, and what we do can’t be told within the bounds of one
letter. Think of seven cows’ milk to churn into butter, besides a cheese
now and then, and besides working for the extra hands we hire this time
o’ year! I should have written to you before, when we first heard of
your accident, if I could have got the time. Hannah Jane is away, and
we’ve let Mattie go with Susie Snow to Grandma Snow’s again for a few
days. Grandma Snow likes to have Mattie come with Susie, for ’t is
rather a still, dull place. So you must think we are quite lonesome here
now, and we are, especially mother. Father tells her she’d better
advertise for a companion. I’ve a good mind to advertise to be a
companion. What do companions do? The old lady might be cross, or the
old gentleman, but that wouldn’t hurt me, so long as I kept clever
myself. Don’t doubt I’d get fun out of it some way. There’s fun in about
everything I think.
I’ve been trying to get father and mother to go to Aunt Lucy’s and stay
all night. But father thinks there wouldn’t be anybody to shut the
barn-door, and mother thinks there wouldn’t be anybody to do anything,
though I’ve promised to scald the pans, and do up the starched things,
and keep Tommy out of the sugar-bowl. He takes a lump every chance he
can get. Takes after his father. Father puts sugar on sweetened
puddings, if mother isn’t looking! We’ve made some verses to plague
Tommy, and when Mattie gets her piano, they’re going to be set to music.