The doll's house (Adapted from Katherine Mansfield)

When dear old Mrs. Hay went back to town after staying with the Burnells, she sent the children a doll's house It was so big that the servants carried it into the yard and left it there.

The Burnell children had never seen anything like it in their lives. All the rooms were papered with pictures on the walls A red carpet covered all the floors except the kitchen; there were tables, beds with real bedclothes, a stove, a dresser with very small plates and one big jug. But what Kezia liked more than anything was the lamp. It was all ready for lighting.

The Burnell children could hardly walk to school fast enough the next morning. They burned to tell everybody about their doll's house.

The mother said that while the doll's house stood in the yard, they might ask the girls at school, two at a time, to come and see it.

Playtime came and the girls of Isabel's class nearly fought to put their arms round her, to be her special friend, and there v/ere only two who stayed outside, the little Kelveys.

For the fact was, the school the Burnell children went to was not at all the kind of place their parents would have liked to attend. But it was the only school for miles.

As a result all the children of the neighborhood, rich and poor, had to mix together. But many of the children, including the Burner's, were not allowed even to speak to the Kelveys. They walked past the Kelveys with their heads in the air. Even the teacher had a special voice for them and a special smile for the other children.

They were the daughters of a hard-working little washer-wom­an who went one day to one house and one day to another. They were dressed in old clothes given to their mother by the people for whom she worked. Lil came to school in a dress made from a green tablecloth of the Burnells. Her little sister Else wore a long white dress and a pair of little boy's boots. Nobody had ever seen her smile: she hardly ever spoke. She went through life holding on to Lil.

Now again they did not mix with the girls, but you couldn't stop them from listening.

Letters in the mail After e.Coldwell

In general, almost everybody likes to receive mail and probably nobody in the whole town of Stillwater liked to get letters more than Rat Buffin. However, the fact was that Ray received fewer letters in his box at the post office than anybody else.

It had been like that almost all his life. Nobody wrote letters to him except that once 'a month he did get a bill from the gas and electric company, and occasionally he found advertising matter in his box like everybody else in town.

0f course, since he did not correspond with anybody, he never wrote a letter himself .But once, many years before, he had written a letter to a young girl in town. He had written to tell her how beautiful and lovely he thought she was and how much lie loved her. He ended the letter by asking her to marry him, but he had received no answer.

In Stillwater, mail was delivered once a day. Every afternoon, except Sundays, the bus from New Orleans stopped in the town before the post office and delivered two or three mail bags full of letters, magazines and newspapers. Soon after they were put into the letter boxes, Ray always closed his shop, where he made a living repairing radios, and hurried to the post office. He was very disappointed if there was no mail for him, but he always had a feeling that one of these days he would get some.

Two of the younger men in town, Guy Hodge and Ralph Barnhill, decided to play a joke on Ray. They would send him a letter signed by a girl. When he received it, someone would ask him if it was a love letter, and someone else would take it from him and read it to everyone who wanted to listen. They asked Grace Brooks, the switch operator at the telephone company, to write the letter. Grace was a pretty girl although not very young anymore.