feel perfectly certain it had something to do with me. I think Aunt Ruth didn’t get her own way, either, for she snubbed me continually all through supper, and said I was growing weedy! Aunt Ruth generally snubs me and Uncle Wallace patronises me. I prefer Aunt Ruth’s snubs because I don’t have to look as if I liked them. I endured them to a certain point, and then the lid flew off. Aunt Ruth said to me,
“‘Em’ly, don’t contradict,’ just as she might have spoken to a mere child. I looked her right in the eyes and said coldly,
“‘Aunt Ruth, I think I am too old to be spoken to in that fashion now.’
“‘You are not too old to be very rude and impertinent,’ said Aunt Ruth, with a sniff, ‘and if I were in Elizabeth’s place I would give you a sound box on the ear, Miss.’
“I hate to be Em’ly’d and Miss’d and sniffed at! It seems to me that Aunt Ruth has all the Murray faults, and none of their virtues.
“Uncle Oliver’s son Andrew came with him and is going to stay for a week. He is four years older than I am.
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“This is my birthday. I am fourteen years old today. I wrote a letter ‘From myself at fourteen to myself at twenty-four,’ sealed it up and put it away in my cupboard, to be opened on my twenty-fourth birthday. I made some predictions in it. I wonder if they will have come to pass when I open it.
“Aunt Elizabeth gave me back all Father’s books today. I was so glad. It seems to me that a part of Father is in those books. His name is in each one in his own handwriting, and the notes he made on the margins. They seem like little bits of letters from him. I have been looking over them all the evening, and Father seems so near to me again, and I feel both happy and sad.
“One thing spoiled the day for me. In school, when
