"Any fellow want some iron ore? I've come from Marietta, Ohio, and I'll exchange it for real Indian arrow-heads."
"Here I've come all the way from Strasburg, in Alsace, with a new puzzle. I'm sure nobody can read it."
"We take HARPER'S YOUNG PEOPLE in Germany. I'm nine years old."
"How can you talk about travelling? I've been shut up in four different mail-bags for nearly two months. I came all the way from Samarang, Java."
"I thought there was a dreadful smell of coffee in the mail-bag," said a letter from Buffalo.
"Coffee!" said the postal card from Java, in a thin straw-board sort of voice--"coffee! I was made out of grass that grew next to a coffee plantation, and one day, just before I was cut down--"
"Gracious me!" said a piping voice that sounded as if it was made of rice-straw. "Did they cut you down?"
"No! It was the grass. That's before I was born. Well, I was a-saying, before I was interrupted, that--"
"Oh, do let 'er alone," said a note from Detroit.
"Ah!" cried all the letters; "let 'er alone. That will do for Detroit."
"Now I came from Manitoba," said a letter that had a crackling voice, as if the ice was breaking. "There's not a house for sixteen miles, and it's very lonesome in winter. We have plenty of ice and snow, and the thermometer stays down near zero so much of the time that they do say it has cold feet. Sometimes we do not see any one for a week; but we do not care."
Just then the editor came in, and the office-boy jumped up and said, "Good-morning, sir; nice lot of letters to-day."
Perhaps you don't believe this story: it's true, for all that. At any rate, the last part is true; for every day there comes to Harper's Young People a great pile of letters from boys and girls in all parts of the civilized world.
I don't say that I didn't do wrong, but what I do say is that I meant to do right. But that don't make any difference. It never does. I try to do my very best, and then something happens, and I am blamed for it. When I think what a disappointing world this is, full of bamboo canes and all sorts of switches, I feel ready to leave it.
It was Sue's fault in the beginning; that is, if it hadn't been for her it wouldn't have happened. One Sunday she and I were sitting in the front parlor, and she was looking out of the window and watching for Mr. Travers; only she said she wasn't, and that she was just looking to see if it was going to rain, and solemnizing her thoughts. I had just asked her how old she was, and couldn't Mr. Travers have been her father if he had married mother, when she said, "Dear me how tiresome that boy is do take a book and read for gracious sake." I said, "What book?" So she gets up and gives me the _Observer_, and says, "There's a beautiful story about a good boy and a pig do read it and keep still if you know how and I hope it will do you some good."