Tennyson Mountain, N. C.,
October 6.

Carin, dear and far:

So you are back at your beloved Vassar! Does it seem as wonderful as it did last year? Or more so? More so, I expect. You were a little lonely and strange last year, you know. But now it will be different. The girls will seem like old friends to you now that you are coming back to them. But, Carin, girl, they cannot possibly be such old friends as I am, or as Annie Laurie is. Don’t dare to like one of them better than you like us. I can imagine, and really spend too much time imagining, just how lovely and cultivated and surprising some of them are. But, please, aren’t some of them quite stupid, too? I hope so. Annie Laurie hopes so. We want still to be the brightest stars in your sky.

Lest you should think we are not, we keep polishing ourselves. Annie Laurie, when she is not attending to her dairy, will take university extension work. And I, your own ever adoring, ever grateful Azalea, will keep hammering away at the books that dear Barbara Summers lends, and Keefe O’Connor sends down from New York, and those that your own library at the Shoals furnishes.

I have the heart to read, Carin, but not the time. That’s the truth. Or, come to think of it, perhaps it is a matter of eyelids. I have a queer, self-closing pair. If they would stay up after nine o’clock at night I could learn something. But, no, they appear to be attached to a wheel or a ratchet in the clock, and when nine strikes, down they go and down they stay.

What can I do?

Nothing, except kiss dearest Mother McBirney good night, trying not to yawn in her face as I do it, and after paying my respects to Father McBirney and “brother” Jim, slip away up to my darling loft.

Now, there, Carin! You see I’m nicer than your other friends, more unusual and surprising. (You told me the last time I saw you that you liked your friends to be unusual and surprising.) Well, have you any other friend who goes up to her bedroom by means of an outside pair of stairs and who sleeps in a loft, with a tame bat for company? You have not, Carin Carson, and you know it. And, Oh, how I love it! Shall I ever have another room I love so well? The soft noises of the night come purling down into it like a stream. The stars of the northern sky shine into it. The mountain-side is like a green curtain hanging before it. When I get up in that little room, my doors and windows wide to old Mount Tennyson’s whispering side, I seem to find my real self. Everything slips away from me except the night and myself and—and God.

Dearest Carin, I am feeling rather serious. It is because of something that I have just come to realize. Do you remember how, at the end of our school-teaching up at Sunset Gap three years ago, your father and mother offered to send me away to school, and I—thanking them more than I could possibly make them understand—refused? I said I wanted it to be Azalea for herself. That I meant to spin my own little web, and that I hoped it would be a silver one.

Since then, as you know, I have tried my best. I decided that I would become a teacher of the mountain handicrafts; I hoped that some day when good Mrs. Kitchell resigned her position as head of the Mountain Industries which your father and mother established, that I could take her place. What is more, I wanted to develop the Industries so that they would become much, much more useful and inspiring and important than they are now. I wanted, too, to fit myself to meet all the people who come to Lee—all the charming, gracious people. You know how I have worked for all this. Haystack Thompson, the best basket-maker in the country, has taught me to make baskets. Mrs. Kitchell, the cleverest little weaver of all the weavers, has instructed me in the weaving of woolen and linen and cotton cloth, and in the making of counterpanes, as well as the knotting of fringe and the looping of fancy edges. Mother McBirney has taught me knitting and lace making and crocheting. I can do a little wood carving. I can make mats. I can weave carpets. Even, if put to it, I can turn a jug. Then I have read and studied and thought. And in doing all that I have grown vain and foolish.

I’ll tell you how I found out.

Dear Father McBirney isn’t well. I think I spoke about this to you the other day. But he’s been getting rapidly worse, and now he can hardly move from his chair. It is rheumatism; and it’s likely to stay with him for a long, long time. He cannot help about the farm at all, and so all of the farm work falls on Jim. He can’t even go about the country to collect the chairs the mountaineers make for the Mountain Industries, as he promised your father he would.

Oh, Carin, do you remember the day you and your father and mother came up to our cabin to ask my foster-parents to go down and take charge of the Industries? And do you remember how Pa and Ma looked about at the darling cabin with its wistaria and trumpet vine, and its Pride of India tree with the graves of their little Molly and my own dear mama beneath it, and how they would not go? And then do you recall how Father McBirney promised to “beat up trade” for the Industries, and so we all stayed in the cabin with its nice open room in between the closed ones, and its own queer little smithy, and its beehives on the south slope, and its martin houses by the door? Oh, the dear, dear little house!

Well, there has been such a demand for the mountain chairs from the visitors to Lee, that the chair-makers have been making a good profit and Father McBirney has been enjoying a nice commission. This winter he quite depended on it, because, owing to his bad health, he hadn’t been able to do as much with the farm as usual. But now he isn’t well enough to go over the mountains arranging about the chairs, or getting them together, so even that little profit is denied us.

What are we to do? Jim may be able to do some hauling for people; there’s wood to be carted, and some work to do for the miller, but it’s very irregular.

And this is where I come in. This is where I am shown up as a person with much vanity and little common sense. For, of course, it should be my part to make ready money for the family. And I can’t. I don’t know how. I have been thinking I was so capable, and now I see I’m just as useless as—as most girls!

Of course I could go away somewhere else and perhaps find some other place where the mountain industries are being developed. But ought I to leave home now? I seem to be very much needed. As you know, sometimes our sweet, unselfish Mother McBirney gets melancholy. She has lived so long away up here on the mountain that her thoughts get to turning inward, and she remembers about Molly’s death, and then for days she is silent and brooding, and we all tremble for her. She looks far, far away and pays almost no attention to what we say to her. This is a very real danger, and if I were not here to shake her out of these moods, who knows what might happen?

So there I am, I who wanted to do such wonderful independent things, I who thought I had learned so much, about as useless as anyone could be. At least, as a money-earner. Of course I am not sitting about, beating my breast and throwing dust on my head. I hope you don’t think that. No, I have Mother McBirney’s loom in good working order, and have set it up not too far away from the fireplace, and I am throwing that shuttle like mad, weaving some perfectly fascinating counterpanes. You ought to see the one in red and black in the Tudor rose pattern. Truly, it’s a beauty. I know I can sell it easily enough, and I’m going to charge a good price for it, too. I’m a greedy pig.

But you see, I must have money.

By rights, Father McBirney ought to have a change. He should go down to Bethal Springs. The waters there are said to cure some terrible cases of rheumatism. But he couldn’t go without Mother; and Mother wouldn’t go without Jim. So there you are. Such a puzzle!

Jim is dreadfully on my mind, too. What do you think has happened to him? He has “got religion.” Yes, I know you are laughing. Jim, the tease of the world, Jim with freckles and warts and funny words, and the very dickens in him. But it is true. Mr. Summers did it—talked to him in the woods, and Jim “saw the light.” And now he wants to be a preacher like Mr. Summers. You ought to hear him preaching to the horses when he combs them down. I listen. Perhaps I ought not to. I don’t do it to make fun, you may be sure. I do it because the poor boy is so earnest and surprising. You can’t think what beautiful things he says. Nights he studies the Bible and some books Mr. Summers gives him. He drives away to town once every week to help with the Epworth League meeting, and he has got up some sort of a society among the boys, and has induced the members to pledge themselves not to drink whiskey or chew tobacco, or use profane words, or do any other horrid thing.

Our Jim!

Carin, we’re all growing up, aren’t we?

You with your long dresses and touch-me-not air, and Annie Laurie, one of our leading business persons! And Sam Disbrow buying stock in Annie Laurie’s dairy, and Hi Kitchell doing draying, and Dick Heller going in the bank, and Keefe O’Connor sending me the catalogue of his “Autumn Exhibit.” You can fancy how Keefe played up Sunset Gap in his pictures! I could tell from the names where he had painted about half of them. I’ll send you the catalogue. But return it, won’t you? It seems like a memento of that queer, wild, happy summer at the Gap.That was the last summer we really spent together. To be sure I have had glimpses of you, but usually you have been away on your wonderful journeys with your father and mother, and I have had to go about the mountain roads alone. But I haven’t minded, Carin, and you mustn’t think that I have. I tried to picture the beautiful places you were in, and the parties you were going to, and the pictures and palaces you were seeing, and I knew that if I was thinking of you, that you were thinking of me, too. It kept my heart warm; it peopled the lonely mountain roads.

I’ll tell you this, my Carin: Next to a well-loved human face, a well-loved road is the best thing. The sight of a familiar clump of grass can be as dear as a threshold. Twists of tree trunks, odd embankments, colors of the road, above all, the turns of a road, get to be like a part of one’s life. The little smells that come up from earth and grass and flower, rising over and over again from the same place, affect one almost like the voices of “home folk.” Even the wind on the face, though the wind is so wild and strange a thing, makes one feel at ease in one’s world; and the burst of the sun over a hill, or the going down of it at the close of a busy day—busy both for you and the sun—can make you realize as few things can, that you are the child of God—of the great Father, so silent, so unknowable, who has made suns and birds, mountains and little friendly crickets.

Oh, beautiful, beautiful life! In spite of trouble and sickness, perplexity and poverty, beautiful, beautiful life!

Dear Carin, don’t laugh at me if my letter has been a bit too ecstatic. You are surrounded all the time with fine teachers and brilliant friends, and moving, shifting life. I am just here by myself, so to speak. Yes, yes, dear, I know my own McBirneys are beside me. I have no desire deeper than the desire to help them. Yet, Carin, are they my kind of people? You know they are not; they know it. We try to be alike, but we cannot be, really.

I am the granddaughter of Colonel Atherton on one side; the granddaughter of some other proud old gentleman on the other side. For it was pride that made my grandfather Knox turn his son, my father, adrift. True, the McBirneys took me, a little ragged wanderer, orphaned and desolate, from a traveling show; but that was an accident in my life. It cannot change the fact that I have the tastes of the Athertons and the Knoxes, who have loved beauty and hospitality and other gracious things.

Oh, me, am I insinuating that Mother McBirney is not hospitable or that she does not love beauty? If so, shame on me. Her door stands open to every wanderer. It stood open to me. The flowers about her walls, and the purple valley below her hill, delight her. Yes, she is a true lover of beauty. May we never lose sight of each other, and to the last may I feel her hand waiting to grasp mine in whatever darkness she or I may have to walk through. I only say I wish I might, sometimes, have someone like you, my Carin, to talk with. Of course, there is Barbara Summers. But she is in the valley and I on the mountain.

Equally of course, there are Keefe O’Connor’s letters. And there are yours. Be sure you send me one soon.

Do not mind my changing moods. I am, after all, always the same old

Azalea.P. S. This is the evening of the same day.

Who do you think called?

Mrs. Kitchell, Hi’s little brown mother, all in new clothes, with white cotton gloves on her hands—the hands that used to be so hard and scratched and battered with work. She had a red rose on her new fall hat, and her shoes were blacked. And you know what shoes are at Lee! The standard is low, owing to red mud and lack of elbow activity. But Mrs. Kitchell was grand. There is no other word for it.

This, however, is not the most exciting part of what I have to tell. Haystack Thompson was with her, and he actually wore a hat. Yes, he did too, Carin Carson. What is more, his hair had been cut—a little. But you could get seven crops a year of his hair, just as you can of alfalfa. He, too, was wonderful. He wore a collar. It was of celluloid, and it shone like Mother McBirney’s best milk pan. He did not bring his fiddle, and that made me feel sad. If he wants to court Hi’s “ma,” why let him, but is that any reason why he should turn his back on his faithful Betsy, his fiddle?

I felt like saying to him: “Haystack, Haystack, can any woman understand you, answer you, listen to you, rejoice with you, as your fiddle did? Will any woman cost you so little? Ask so few questions? Be such a companion on rainy and sunshiny days?”

But of course I didn’t say anything of the kind. Little Mrs. Kitchell is a brave creature, and Haystack is a lonely one. So if they decide to marry, I and everyone else ought to be glad. The only thing that really troubles me is how they are going to live. Dear Haystack never earns any money, except in little driblets, making baskets or playing at dances. Do you suppose that after that little beaver, Mrs. Kitchell, has reared a family of four, alone and unaided, that she’ll turn in and support Haystack in his old age? Wouldn’t that be odd of her? Still, perhaps she might like it. Hi, as I say, is “draying.” He has a pair of claybank mules and he is a proud man, I can tell you. He works quite as hard as anybody in Lee—harder than most. But he doesn’t like to be “driv.” You know he wouldn’t.

“When will that trunk be up to the house, expressman?” the Northerners say, not so much as looking at him.Then you ought to hear Hi drawl. You know his drawl! But it’s grown worse.

“Sometime along in the forenoon, I reckon, ma’am.”

“Aren’t you sure of it? Because if you aren’t, I shall get another man to bring it up.”

“Yessum. Only I’m the only one in town jest now that does trunk haulin’. But don’t you worry, ma’am. I feel tollable sure that there trunk will git up to you-all’s house some time before evenin’.”

You can just hear the Northerners pant when he says that.

I know you and your people are Northerners, Carin, dear, but you’re not the snap-turtle variety.

I do wish you’d been down here this summer. I had so much to tell you. The Shoals looked very lonely with none of you in it. Was it so lovely up there in Maine that you forgot our purple mountains? I know it must be beautiful up there. I look at the map, and follow all the queer little inlets and outlets, and think how bright the water must be as it breaks on the rocks.

Well, we have had wonderful things to look at ourselves. Why, only to-day the mountains looked like gigantic plums, with rich purple bloom all over them; and the sky went to the trouble to try to match them. But I’d have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been so poor. Not that I’m any poorer than usual, but I feel poorer because I see that at last it is “up to me” to be the money-maker. And I don’t know how to begin.

I have explained to you distinctly a number of times, my dear Carin, that when I write this way I do it to ease my feelings. I want your advice. But that is all I do want of you, except, of course, your love and sympathy. I know you ache to play fairy godmother. You’ve tried to do that many times. But I think you understand pretty well by now that that wouldn’t really help me out. I want my own fight, my own life, my own victories. Just at present I’m terribly puzzled, because I want to help Father and Mother McBirney and Jim.

I can’t write it all to Keefe, because—well because he might be able to think of a way to help me out, but not of a way to help the others. Keefe is terribly impulsive, and he will not realize how young he is. He is disgracefully young. So am I. That extreme youthfulness of ours gets in the way of some of his plans. No, I can’t write him. He isn’t sensible. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he paints so well. Did I tell you he was making rather a specialty of portraits? He sent me one of a young Jewish girl who is in his color class at the Academy of Design. He says her name is Miriam. She fits the name.

Keefe wants to come down here this winter, but I’m not going to let him. There is no reason why he should come to this one place out of all the places in the world. Let him go up to Sunset Gap to his own wonderful little sister, Mary Cecily Rowantree. He says he needs inspiration, but if anyone can give it to him, she can. You see, if he came here, he would be terribly interrupting, and I cannot and will not be interrupted. I’m going to earn the living for the family, though, as I said at the beginning, I don’t know how.

Carin, I go out and sit down beside my dear little mama’s grave and think and think. I tell her how good these people were to her, how good they have been to me ever since that terrible day when I was left alone, and I beg her if she is indeed a spirit now, who can see and understand the things that are hidden from us earth-bound ones, that she will put something into my heart to tell me what to do.

I am ready, Carin, to prove myself. Here I am with my strong body, with my heart full to bursting with gratitude and love, with my waiting hands and brain. But I need direction. You couldn’t give me that, could you, dear yellow-headed one?

Yes, I wish you might have come home this summer. It would have helped. Barbara Summers was away, too. She went home to see her people for the first time since she was married. You remember her people didn’t approve of her marriage. She had a very happy time, and all is well between her and them at last. Of Annie Laurie I see little. She is too busy. But we signal each other, she from her roof, I from the “Outlook.”

Good-bye, dear. If I write you too much, forgive me. I need to write. It comforts me. You understand all I say—all I do not say, too.

Lovingly, always,

Azalea.