Daddy-Long-Legs - Jean Webster (best e reader for academics txt) š
- Author: Jean Webster
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Dear me, Daddy, but it was a funny sensation! I felt as benevolent as a Trustee of the John Grier home. I kissed one sweet, sticky little boyābut I donāt think I patted any of them on the head!
And two days after Christmas, they gave a dance at their own house for ME.
It was the first really true ball I ever attendedācollege doesnāt count where we dance with girls. I had a new white evening gown (your Christmas presentāmany thanks) and long white gloves and white satin slippers. The only drawback to my perfect, utter, absolute happiness was the fact that Mrs. Lippett couldnāt see me leading the cotillion with Jimmie McBride. Tell her about it, please, the next time you visit the J. G. H. Yours ever, Judy Abbott
PS. Would you be terribly displeased, Daddy, if I didnāt turn out to be a Great Author after all, but just a Plain Girl?
6.30, Saturday Dear Daddy,
We started to walk to town today, but mercy! how it poured. I like winter to be winter with snow instead of rain.
Juliaās desirable uncle called again this afternoonāand brought a five-pound box of chocolates. There are advantages, you see, about rooming with Julia.
Our innocent prattle appeared to amuse him and he waited for a later train in order to take tea in the study. We had an awful lot of trouble getting permission. Itās hard enough entertaining fathers and grandfathers, but uncles are a step worse; and as for brothers and cousins, they are next to impossible. Julia had to swear that he was her uncle before a notary public and then have the county clerkās certificate attached. (Donāt I know a lot of law?) And even then I doubt if we could have had our tea if the Dean had chanced to see how youngish and good-looking Uncle Jervis is.
Anyway, we had it, with brown bread Swiss cheese sandwiches. He helped make them and then ate four. I told him that I had spent last summer at Lock Willow, and we had a beautiful gossipy time about the Semples, and the horses and cows and chickens. All the horses that he used to know are dead, except Grover, who was a baby colt at the time of his last visitāand poor Grove now is so old he can just limp about the pasture.
He asked if they still kept doughnuts in a yellow crock with a blue plate over it on the bottom shelf of the pantryāand they do! He wanted to know if there was still a woodchuckās hole under the pile of rocks in the night pastureāand there is! Amasai caught a big, fat, grey one there this summer, the twenty-fifth great-grandson of the one Master Jervis caught when he was a little boy.
I called him `Master Jervieā to his face, but he didnāt appear to be insulted. Julia says she has never seen him so amiable; heās usually pretty unapproachable. But Julia hasnāt a bit of tact; and men, I find, require a great deal. They purr if you rub them the right way and spit if you donāt. (That isnāt a very elegant metaphor. I mean it figuratively.)
Weāre reading Marie Bashkirtseffās journal. Isnāt it amazing? Listen to this: `Last night I was seized by a fit of despair that found utterance in moans, and that finally drove me to throw the dining-room clock into the sea.ā
It makes me almost hope Iām not a genius; they must be very wearing to have aboutāand awfully destructive to the furniture.
Mercy! how it keeps Pouring. We shall have to swim to chapel tonight. Yours ever, Judy
20th Jan. Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
Did you ever have a sweet baby girl who was stolen from the cradle in infancy?
Maybe I am she! If we were in a novel, that would be the denouement, wouldnāt it?
Itās really awfully queer not to know what one isāsort of exciting and romantic. There are such a lot of possibilities. Maybe Iām not American; lots of people arenāt. I may be straight descended from the ancient Romans, or I may be a Vikingās daughter, or I may be the child of a Russian exile and belong by rights in a Siberian prison, or maybe Iām a GipsyāI think perhaps I am. I have a very WANDERING spirit, though I havenāt as yet had much chance to develop it.
Do you know about that one scandalous blot in my career the time I ran away from the asylum because they punished me for stealing cookies? Itās down in the books free for any Trustee to read. But really, Daddy, what could you expect? When you put a hungry little nine-year girl in the pantry scouring knives, with the cookie jar at her elbow, and go off and leave her alone; and then suddenly pop in again, wouldnāt you expect to find her a bit crumby? And then when you jerk her by the elbow and box her ears, and make her leave the table when the pudding comes, and tell all the other children that itās because sheās a thief, wouldnāt you expect her to run away?
I only ran four miles. They caught me and brought me back; and every day for a week I was tied, like a naughty puppy, to a stake in the back yard while the other children were out at recess.
Oh, dear! Thereās the chapel bell, and after chapel I have a committee meeting. Iām sorry because I meant to write you a very entertaining letter this time. Auf wiedersehen Cher Daddy, Pax tibi! Judy
PS. Thereās one thing Iām perfectly sure of Iām not a Chinaman.
4th February Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,Jimmie McBride has sent me a Princeton banner as big as one end of the room; I am very grateful to him for remembering me, but I donāt know what on earth to do with it. Sallie and Julia wonāt let me hang it up; our room this year is furnished in red, and you can imagine what an effect weād have if I added orange and black. But itās such nice, warm, thick felt, I hate to waste it. Would it be very improper to have it made into a bath robe? My old one shrank when it was washed.
Iāve entirely omitted of late telling you what I am learning, but though you might not imagine it from my letters, my time is exclusively occupied with study. Itās a very bewildering matter to get educated in five branches at once.
`The test of true scholarship,ā says Chemistry Professor, `is a painstaking passion for detail.ā
`Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail,ā says History Professor. `Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.ā
You can see with what nicety we have to trim our sails between chemistry and history. I like the historical method best. If I say that William the Conqueror came over in 1492, and Columbus discovered America in 1100 or 1066 or whenever it was, thatās a mere detail that the Professor overlooks. It gives a feeling of security and restfulness to the history recitation, that is entirely lacking in chemistry.
Sixth-hour bellāI must go to the laboratory and look into a little matter of acids and salts and alkalis. Iāve burned a hole as big as a plate in the front of my chemistry apron, with hydrochloric acid. If the theory worked, I ought to be able to neutralize that hole with good strong ammonia, oughtnāt I?
Examinations next week, but whoās afraid? Yours ever, Judy
5th March Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,There is a March wind blowing, and the sky is filled with heavy, black moving clouds. The crows in the pine trees are making such a clamour! Itās an intoxicating, exhilarating, CALLING noise. You want to close your books and be off over the hills to race with the wind.
We had a paper chase last Saturday over five miles of squashy ācross country. The fox (composed of three girls and a bushel or so of confetti) started half an hour before the twenty-seven hunters. I was one of the twenty-seven; eight dropped by the wayside; we ended nineteen. The trail led over a hill, through a cornfield, and into a swamp where we had to leap lightly from hummock to hummock. of course half of us went in ankle deep. We kept losing the trail, and we wasted twenty-five minutes over that swamp. Then up a hill through some woods and in at a barn window! The barn doors were all locked and the window was up high and pretty small. I donāt call that fair, do you?
But we didnāt go through; we circumnavigated the barn and picked up the trail where it issued by way of a low shed roof on to the top of a fence. The fox thought he had us there, but we fooled him. Then straight away over two miles of rolling meadow, and awfully hard to follow, for the confetti was getting sparse. The rule is that it must be at the most six feet apart, but they were the longest six feet I ever saw. Finally, after two hours of steady trotting, we tracked Monsieur Fox into the kitchen of Crystal Spring (thatās a farm where the girls go in bob sleighs and hay wagons for chicken and waffle suppers) and we found the three foxes placidly eating milk and honey and biscuits. They hadnāt thought we would get that far; they were expecting us to stick in the barn window.
Both sides insist that they won. I think we did, donāt you? Because we caught them before they got back to the campus. Anyway, all nineteen of us settled like locusts over the furniture and clamoured for honey. There wasnāt enough to go round, but Mrs. Crystal Spring (thatās our pet name for her; sheās by rights a Johnson) brought up a jar of strawberry jam and a can of maple syrupā just made last weekāand three loaves of brown bread.
We didnāt get back to college till half-past sixāhalf an hour late for dinnerāand we went straight in without dressing, and with perfectly unimpaired appetites! Then we all cut evening chapel, the state of our boots being enough of an excuse.
I never told you about examinations. I passed everything with the utmost easeāI know the secret now, and am never going to fail again. I shanāt be able to graduate with honours though, because of that beastly Latin prose and geometry Freshman year. But I donāt care. Wotās the hodds so long as youāre āappy? (Thatās a quotation. Iāve been reading the English classics.)
Speaking of classics, have you ever read Hamlet? If you havenāt, do it right off. Itās PERFECTLY CORKING. Iāve been hearing about Shakespeare all my life, but I had no idea he really wrote so well; I always suspected him of going largely on his reputation.
I have a beautiful play that I invented a long time ago when I first learned to read. I put myself to sleep every night by pretending Iām the person (the most important person) in the book Iām reading at the moment.
At present Iām Opheliaāand such a sensible Ophelia! I keep Hamlet amused all the time, and pet him and scold him and make him wrap up his throat when he has a cold. Iāve entirely cured him of being melancholy. The King and Queen are both deadāan accident at sea; no funeral necessaryāso Hamlet and I are ruling in Denmark without any
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