The Shoals, November 24.

Dear Aunt Lorena and Dear Uncle David:

Just a line to say that I am safe here and am sending Semmy back to you with many, many thanks. She asked to stay with me, but it was, I fancy, more to compliment me than for any other reason. I would not keep her, of course. She belongs to Mallowbanks, does dear good Greenville Female Seminary Simms. May heaven bless her. I hated to part with her.

Dear me, how many kinds of homesickness one may have. When I was away from Lee I was longing for it; now that I am here I love to dream of Mallowbanks. Still, I am glad I am here. There is work awaiting me. In fact, it is piled high, and someone was desperately needed to take hold of it. Lee is bulging with nice visitors with fashionable-looking purses, and they are wild to do things and spend money. They would rather purchase these mountain products than anything else, because they are such quaint souvenirs of this lovely place. But, alas, all is in confusion in the little shop. The weavers have been lazy, the basket-makers must have been wool gathering, the pottery makers have all been getting married—just like Ma Kitchell—and there is, to say the least, the dickens to pay.

Mr. and Mrs. Carson had been most eager to have me come back and take up the work, but as you know, there was not a hint from them that they wanted me, because, of course, they would not in any way interfere with me, nor tempt me to return. Anyway, I do not suppose they had the faintest idea that I would do so. But when they found that I was willing and ready to take up the work, they were simply delighted, and now they are doing everything in their power to help my task along. Within two or three weeks I hope to have things running very well. I would like to make a good showing before Christmas.

I am staying with my own Carin Carson for the present, because I am not inclined to take the long ride up and down the mountain. It would be too exhausting. Moreover, since I would not be able to help Mother McBirney with the housework, I would very much object to staying there and making her extra trouble. But of course I went up there the day after I arrived. Things are going on quite in the old way with the McBirneys. Except, of course, that Jim is not there, being still at school. Hi Kitchell’s younger brother is a helper for Father McBirney, and seems a fine, willing boy. Father McBirney is pretty well, considering his condition of a year ago, but he will never be quite so strong and nimble as he once was. Mother McBirney is well and happy in her quiet way, and she sends her respects to you.

I am asking a few friends for subscriptions for the Industries. It would not become me to place any limit on their generosity, would it?

Oh, what an impertinent one I am to badger you, when you have already done so much for me!

How am I to thank you for everything? How, above all, am I to express my gratitude to you for your large-minded consideration for my feelings and preferences? I am now a worker in the world of workers, and I am very happy, for a deep need of my being is finding expression. Try to understand as well as to forgive.

With abiding affection,

Azalea.

The Shoals, December 5.

Dearest Miss Delight, my own beloved twenty-seventh cousin:

Oh, why do you not come to see me? You thought you might come along in a week or two. It is more than a week or two and you are not here. I am having such fun, but it would be yet more fun if you were sharing it with me.

I am selling things!

Yes, selling them at the Mountain Industries.

They are going like hot cakes. I haven’t made up my books yet, but from present indications I should say that the Mountain Industries would presently be very, very rich. Of course I’m really not a good judge, because this is the first selling I ever have done, and it may have excited me a bit.

Let me tell you what I have been doing. As I mentioned in the little note I wrote you, things were rather at sixes and sevens here. Mrs. Kitchell, who has had charge of the place from the very beginning, was a fine worker and was and is one of the dearest little things that ever lived, but she wasn’t just the person for managing a growing business. She was better at weaving than at negotiating the weaving of other folk, for example. Actually, when I came to look things over I found quantities of fine saleable stuff tucked away here and there. No one ever had come in and demanded those particular things—not knowing of the existence of them—and they had therefore remained unsold.

I had the whole “kit an’ bilin’” taken out in the yard and spread around on bushes and fences and the ground and aired and aired and aired! Then I had the salesroom calcimined a most magnificent pumpkin color. The decorator was as stupid as a rabbit about mixing the right color, so Carin came over and did it. Then I had racks put around the wall. Some of them hung from the ceiling; some stood on the floor. Also I had a few drawers and shelves put up, and I got some show cases with black finishings, and I furnished the room with mountain furniture stained black. Also I have the floor covered with extra heavy rag carpeting in pumpkin yellow and black.

Fancy, if you please, how beautiful my blue hand-woven coverlets and my brown-and-orange and black-and-red counterpanes look against this wall. Fancy how attractive is the snarl of fine hand-woven baskets that I have tied up on one side of the room.

What is more, we are now opening a regular tea room. Mrs. Kitchell had had one at the beginning, but it had fallen into nothingness. Now I have one—the darlingest room—all in golden brown and white. It complements the other room in the nicest way, and yet is very different indeed. I have some curious Japanese dishes, sort of crackled in effect, white and brown, and odd serving dishes in dull yellow majolica. And we use the mountain-made trays of willow and some of the mountain pottery. I have three neat, sweet, fleet mountain girls in here helping with the tea room, and people simply throng to it. I write out the little menu every morning before I get out of bed, and one of these girls, who really has a head on her, prepares the things in the most appetizing manner.

“People,” I said to her, “don’t come in here because they are hungry. They come because they want to be amused. And they won’t be amused unless everything looks beautiful.”

Carin is doing a lot of the cooking. She is doing it because she wants to know how to cook. She is going to be married before spring, and there is simply no use in her trying to do anything in her own kitchen. The servants won’t let her; or if they do consent they all stand around and watch till she is so nervous she can’t do a thing. But over in our kitchen she can do just what she pleases. She makes those delicious little cakes called “hermits” and “marguerites” and “rocks” and her sandwiches are as good to look at as they are to taste. She has a new kind every day.

I am terribly stern with her about keeping books, however, and she has to put down every cent she spends. The tea room must make money for us or we’ll not run it. I have become fiercely practical.

Oh, how light my heart is! There is so much to do each day that I can hardly get through, and I fall asleep as soon as I touch the bed, and am oblivious to the whole world until my alarm goes off. But I set my alarm pretty early because each day I must think out my work before I get up. I write out my program for the day and insist on following it.

Of course quantities and quantities of people come in the shop who do not purchase, but I do not waste much time with them. I have a little sign on the wall telling our patrons to look around as much as they please, and when they have made their selection to let us know. I add that they are most welcome; whether they purchase or no, they are to make themselves at home.

Meantime, I have a pleasant young girl at hand ready to wait on them when they wish her to, and I, though I appear to be busy with other matters, keep an ear cocked, and if she seems to need reinforcing, I come to her assistance. By the way, who do you suppose that girl is? Why, she is Liza Wixon, from Mount Hebron, the girl whose soup I sampled so generously without invitation. I have persuaded both her mother and her to come down and help me. So they have put their sadness behind them and are working like good fellows. Of course they have a secret of some kind, but I shall never ask what it is.

I am sending off letters to our workers, begging them to hasten their wares to us, telling them the demand for their work is here. All we need is the goods.

No, I don’t go anywhere. Do you wish I would? When I first came home people began giving me teas and all that, but I begged them not to.

“Come and see me Sunday afternoons,” I told them. “I mustn’t indulge in a social life. I wouldn’t have time and strength for that along with all my work.”

I knew the people who really cared for me would come, and as for the others, it would be better for them to visit their chosen friends and not bother with me.

Well, why don’t you come to visit me and to help me with the Christmas trade? Wouldn’t it be the joy of the world to see the exclusive Miss Delight Ravanel waiting on people and wearing a pleasant saleslady’s smile? It would fill me with great glee. Please come down here and let me see you doing it.

Do you miss me? I miss you very, very much. Evenings, when I leave the drawing-room and go up to my own quiet room, I think of you sitting by yourself, so lady-fine and peaceful beside your lamp, your busy needles and thoughts going, and outside the trees sighing and the wind whistling. How still you can be, dear friend. Is it hard to learn to be as still as that?

I have been telling Barbara Summers all about you. Of course she had met you at the time of my coming-out party, but she couldn’t possibly know you—or even guess you—until she had sat with you evening after evening as I have, in so pleasant a “solitude of two” and mined for your treasures of brain and heart. For you hide your virtues as other people do their faults.

Dear Delight R., I have had occasion whenever I went to Mother McBirney’s, to go by the place I used to call mine. I mean that little, out-looking bench on the mountain-side where the tulip trees rustle and the spring of cold water whispers. I have already told you that a house is going up there. Well, it is beginning really to look like a house now, and I cannot resist dismounting every time I pass it, and looking it over.

It is going to be a bewitching house, nothing less. There is a covered porch which in winter is to be made into a sun room, that literally hangs over the blue abyss, but so firmly is it supported with its foundations of cement and its huge beams of oak, that it is as firm and enduring as the mountain-side itself. There is a long, fine living room; the mantel is to be of blue tile—yes, and the chimney piece, too. It will be curious, will it not? But I think I shall like it. There are two bedrooms on the first floor, and there is, of course, the kitchen and a small dining room. The wood is chestnut, which takes on a beautiful color when it is oiled.

Upstairs there is a bedroom which reminds me of my dear little loft at Mother McBirney’s only that it is, of course, to be very nicely finished off. It looks up the mountain-side, too, and it opens on a sleeping porch. Then there is a long room beside it, the use of which I do not know. Perhaps it is being left undivided merely because it is not needed for present use. I have asked a number of persons who is building this house, but no one seems to know. The contractor is a friend of mine, but even he professes to know nothing. He says that a man at Rutherford is doing all the business with him, but that he understands it is for some gentleman who wishes to have a quiet spot to come to now and then, and who once visited Lee and saw this beautiful building site.

Well, if he had taken any other spot in the whole county except the particular one that he did, he would be welcome. But as it is, he annoys me.

Haven’t I chattered about enough? Mind, I am looking for you. I want you to come down and play at being a “rich merchant” with me.

If you see the good people at Mallowbanks, give them my love, please.

Fondly,

Azalea.

The Shoals, November 21.

Dear Aunt Lorena:

I have just come home from the wedding of my dear Annie Laurie Pace to Samuel Disbrow. It was quite a sudden affair at the last. Of course they have been in love with each other for years, and it must be a year and a half since they became engaged. But they were both so busy superintending the dairy which Annie Laurie’s father left her, and following up their university extension course, that we had about decided, Carin and I, that they had forgotten all about getting married.

But it seems that we were mistaken. They were thinking about it all of the time.

The wedding was held in the Baptist church, and there were three ministers to make it what it should be. There was the Baptist minister, who belonged there, and the Methodist minister—Mr. Summers—who helped because Annie Laurie loved him, and there was old Mr. Mills, who came back from Florida to put on the finishing touches, because Annie Laurie had known him ever since she was a baby.She looked glorious, did Annie Laurie, so tall and strong and fine, with her dark red hair burnished like a bird’s breast, all in her white, with her floating veil. Instead of bride’s roses she carried a bouquet of great tawny chrysanthemums the color of her hair. Sam has grown to be a magnificent fellow and everyone likes him. When I remember what a pale-faced, anxious boy he was once, and see what a strong, capable, independent fellow he has become, I feel tremendously proud, not only of him, but of Lee, which helped him to make himself what he is. There was a time when everybody thought him the son of a thief, and when he was broken-hearted with grief and shame, when he might have gone down and become worse than nothing. But he wanted to be good and fine, and everybody in Lee turned in and gave him a boost. Annie Laurie helped most of all, of course.

Now she has her reward.

They have gone away on a wedding trip, and I am so glad. Never before has either of them gone outside of the state they were born in. But now she and Sam are off to the North, and will visit New York and Boston, Washington and Baltimore, and a number of other places. Fortunately, they have a good superintendent, and the dairy will get on very well without them. I am going to stay in the house with Annie Laurie’s two aunts until she returns. Aunt Adnah is very restless, and Aunt Zillah cannot manage her very well, but when I am there I can, I think, keep them amused. I move over to-morrow, and shall stay in Annie Laurie’s own room, which is as clean, if not as bare, as in the old days when I knew it first.

How Annie Laurie did want dear old Haystack Thompson to play at the little dance after the wedding! But he is not to be found. Never since he ran away from good little Mrs. Kitchell has he been seen or heard of. But I can’t believe that any harm has come to him. He is off in some other part of his beloved mountains, fiddling for new friends. I miss him terribly. Don’t think me egotistical, but I do wonder if he would return if he knew that I was back here. He always loved me quite out of proportion to my deserts. It was because he helped to find me that time I was kidnapped, I think, and because I was such a queer, unlucky little girl and needed him so much. But whatever the reason, we are great friends, and I can not think of anything that would give me greater pleasure than to see him loping down the mountain-side, with his fiddle under his arm, and his hair all in a shock, like a windblown haystack.

I had no time to prepare a fit present for Annie Laurie, the announcement of her wedding was so unexpected. So now I am weaving a counterpane for her of blue, orange and white in the wheel and star pattern. It is going to be beautiful, and will bring color into her room, which always has been too austere. Carin has ordered a beautiful rug from New York, which will have the same colors in it. And Mrs. Carson will give the hangings of blue for the windows. So we shall have a charming room for her by the time she returns. The truth is, Annie Laurie never pays any attention to herself or to the things which she alone uses, beyond keeping everything spotlessly clean and in order after the immemorial fashion of the Paces.

But she deserves a beautiful bedroom, and she shall have it.I am so busy in the shop during the day that I have to weave the counterpane at night. I might have someone else do it, only I prefer to do it with my own hands. Anyway, I have to economize a bit. Not that I mind. Which reminds me that the first installment of the annuity dear grandmother provided for me, arrived safely. Enclosed please find receipt. Mr. Carson is paying me a nice little salary for my work at the Industries. So I am well provided for, as you see. But I want to be a bit saving, because now, indeed, Azalea is out for herself, and she does not want to have to fall back on anybody.

I am sorry Uncle David does not write me. He isn’t vexed with me, is he? Oh, I know he is disappointed. I know I seem to him not to have done the right or the grateful thing. But try to make him understand that I love him. I had to go my own way, that is all. And I am justified; I feel that in my heart. I enjoy each moment as it comes, and I continually feel that something yet more glorious is about to happen.

With devotion,

Azalea.