Dear Mamma:-This surely feels like spring. It has been warm all day. This morning I walked around Jamaica Pond over to Brookline to the Harvard church. It was very pretty through the park, but very bad walking. I got there just on time, though I had little idea when I started how long it would take. Dr. Vernon was very good indeed. I'll inclose the literature. The choir sang one thing splendidly. But I can't imagine how any architect or any committee could have evolved or accepted the plan for that church! It's dreadful, though evidently costly. There's enough carved flimsy scaffolding overhead to spoil it and little slim pillars, iron no doubt and probably strong, but looking like matches to hold up the roof.
Slept all the afternoon.
Yesterday there was the Mt. Holyoke Luncheon at the Vendome. There must have been 125 or more there, and many whom I knew. Saw Miss Woolley only an instant. She talked about the 75th anniversary and the raising of this new endowment fund. Dean Arnold of Simmons was the other speaker and spoke very well too about the work there. There were three shorter toasts and music also. Lydia Sanderson Capen, 1895, who lives very near here but who has been away a long time, is back. I went over a few minutes the other evening. She is the wife of the son of Samuel Capen, and they live with them. She has charge of the costumes for this big missionary pageant to come this spring, and is working very hard.
Did I tell you I had a birthday letter from Lucy Baker? It reached me on the 22nd - which seemed remarkable calculation. She is digging away at the language and getting to know about things. Lydia Capen has been there and says it is a big place, with a large foreign colony in Hankow, just across the river from Wuchang, so Lucy is less isolated than we thought. Lydia thought the teachers not very cogenial when she visited the school.
I had a nice letter from Eva Noyes. She is giving up her teaching for the rest of the year, because she is tired out, but she is going down to N.Y. for a few weeks study in book-binding.
I shall write tonight to the street commissioner about the brown-tails, since I get no reply from the mayor. Not very business-like! He'd better take lessons of the miserable Gov. Foss. Olive Ware wrote asking him a question and received a most courteous reply at once.
Haven't decided whether to go up this Saturday and try to see Mr. Clough, or whether to wait a while longer, two weeks say. I'll let you know as I see how my work goes. It has been horrid this last week. Couldn't get one thing done, somehow.
I'm glad Jessee is better and hope Helen Kittredge will soon be out of danger.
With love to you,
Abby