I had no idea what a mere letter--a mere unopened unread letter--would mean to a family like this.
"It has no stamp on it!" exclaimed the older girl.
Mrs.Clark turned it over wonderingly in her hands.

Mr.Clark hastily put on a pair of steel-bowed spectacles.
"Let me see it," he said, and when he also had inspected it minutely he solemnly tore open the envelope and drew forth my letter.
'I assure you I never awaited the reading of any writing of mine with such breathless interest.

How would they take it?
Would they catch the meaning that I meant to convey?
And would they suspect me of having written it?
Mr.Clark sat on the porch and read the letter slowly through to the end, turned the sheet over and examined it carefully, and then began reading it again to himself, Mrs.Clark leaning over his shoulder.
"What does it mean ?" asked Mr.Clark.
"It's too good to be true," said Mrs.Clark with a sigh.
I don't know how long the discussion might have continued--probably for days or weeks--had not the older girl, now flushed of face and rather pretty, looked at me and said breathlessly (she was as sharp as a briar): "You wrote it." I stood the battery of all their eyes for a moment, smiling and rather excited.
"Yes," I said earnestly, "I wrote it, and I mean every word of it." I had anticipated some shock of suspicion and inquiry, but to my surprise it was accepted as simply as a neighbourly good morning.

I suppose the mystery of it was eclipsed by my astonishing presence there upon the scene with my tin whistle.
At any rate, it was a changed, eager, interested family which now occupied the porch of that dilapidated farmhouse.

And immediately we fell into a lively discussion of crops and farming, and indeed the whole farm question, in which I found both the man and his wife singularly acute--sharpened upon the stone of hard experience.
Indeed, I found right here, as I have many times found among our American farmers, an intelligence (a literacy growing out of what I believe to be improper education) which was better able to discuss the problems of rural life than to grapple with and solve them.