"My dear
Lilly" A letter from Annie Fellows Johnston to a close friend,
Lilly (??We think Lillian Barbour of Evansville, IN), sent from Boerne Texas, in September 1908.
This letter is packed with previously unpublished background information on
Annie Fellows Johnston's personal life at the time, as well as quite a bit
of insight on The Giant Scissors and Mary Ware, the Little
Colonel's Chum.
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"Penacres"
-- Boerne, Kendall Co. Texas
September 23, 1908
My dear Lilly:-
I had your steamer postal, and now the one from Vevey. I am
so glad you are having this trip and realizing one of your dearest
daydreams of seeing the beautiful
foreign places.1
I have thought of you often
during the long hot summer, but never got around to a letter, because I
was taxed to the limit of my endurance by foolishly allowing myself to be
persuaded to write another book.
Mamie2
went back to Kentucky in May to escape the heat. She is as much of
an invalid now as John -- although not from the same cause.3
She stayed with Hallie8 till July, then went to Providence, R. I. to spend
three weeks with Mrs. Bliss. -- (General Bliss's widow, who has her
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winter
home in Boerne and is one of the most charming old ladies I ever knew).4
Then she went back to Pewee.
The first of September Hallie and
her husband moved to San Antonio, where he had a fine offer to go into
partnership with one of its leading architects. They have taken a
house there and Mr. Burge, the dogs and servants will follow soon.
Since they left Mamie has been boarding. She expects to go to
Evansville for a week very soon, and reach home early in October.
Then I want to go to Evansville for a short visit. John
was very ill in June. We did not think he could possibly pull
through, but the trained nurse was an unusually good one, and he got over
his attack in a way the doctors thought was nothing short of a miracle. While
he has been far from strong since, he has gone through the summer
remarkably well, and done more actual business than any summer since we
have been West. He has gone into partnership with a young naturalist
out here, under the firm name of the "Armadillo Curio Company,"
and they do a big wholesale business. To this he has added a
menagerie side-line, buying wild animals from Mexico and different parts
of Texas, and shipping them to various zoos and shows. Luckily
he did not have to bring the mountain-lion which he sold to the Washington
Zoo, via Boerne, but he has had a motley assortment of wild-cats,
coyotes, civet cats, squirrels |
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foxes and
queer Mexican birds, to say nothing of the live armadillos here. For
awhile he shipped quantities of non-poisonous snakes to the big zoos to
feed the boa-constrictors, so when one old his friends called the lot back
of the Armadillary (his work-shop) Hell's half-acre I
thought the spot aptly named.5
Of course he only attends to the
correspondence and oversees the feeding and shipping. He has a boy to
handle them, and I think the business is what keeps him up. It is so
full of interest, always something queer and new turning up, that
he hasn't time to think about his ailments, and forges ahead like a well
man till the paroxysms of coughing stop him for awhile.
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The new
book is "Mary Ware: The
Little Colonel's Chum." It was written in the midst of
countless interruptions, ranging from the most serious to the most
unexpected and ridiculous. Really the last two chapters seemed fated
not to be written, so many things interfered, and I was almost desperate
over it.
But fifteen days after the
manuscript was started to Boston, I had received, read and returned the
last proof-sheet. -- pretty rapid work at the printers' end of the line,
and mine also, considering the distance the proof-sheets had to travel
back and forth.
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I have a
feeling that the book cannot be as good as its predecessors, squeezed out
as it was "in the midst of alarms" and such frequent
"scenes of confusion," but I think the allegory of "The
Jester's Sword" is the very best work I have done. I wrote
it last winter intending to publish it in a little book, uniform with
"In the
Desert of Waiting," but when I consented to write the Mary Ware
book, asked the publishers to send it back and delay separate publication
in order that I might make it the motif of the Mary Ware story. It
was partially suggested by that line from Stevenson -- "To renounce
when that shall be necessary and
not be embittered."
After that was off hands I had
another week's work writing a preface and over two hundred lines in
couplets for a diary the publishers are bringing out at the request of
many readers. It is to be called "The Little Colonel - Good
Times Book," such a one as Betty kept, bound in white
and gold - some white linen and some white morocco.
There is to be an autographed
preface, twelve illuminated calendar pages, and then a line heading each
blank page thus
(1) Make of this little white-bound book
(2) A sun-dial for thy garden nook
(3) And on it write the sun-dial sign
(4) "I only mark the hours that shine" etc. |
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I think
the cover design is to be a rosary of pearls, such as Lloyd strung.
It has been so hot in the
afternoons and I was so busy in the mornings that I have made no calls the
entire summer. My sole diversion and exercize has been walking down
for the last mail after sun-down, the round trip not amounting to more
than 1¾ miles.
Since laying aside my pencil I
have made a number of calls , which necessitates a good deal of driving as
the people we visit are mostly out of town a distance of five miles or
so. The ranches are so large that Boerne is like the hub of a wheel
from which the roads radiate in every direction. We can never make |
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more than
one visit in an afternoon, since every one lives at the end of a different
road from any of his neighbors.
Now I am catching up with my
letters - so many, many, from inquisitive readers. Such a dear one
yesterday from a little New York girl who has been spending the summer in
Tours, and who made a pilgrimage to the "Gate
of the Giant Scissors," old Madame Chevral6
and the Little Sisters of the Poor where they hoped to find
Sister Denisa. She was no longer there, but the child procured her
address, thinking I would like it, and added: "Mother and my brother
Jack and I gave the old people a feast |
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of
tobacco, snuff, candy, sugar and cakes, in your honor.
They were delighted and we left the old men smoking and sneezing and the
old women munching their candies. They all sent you a special
"God Bless you".7
This certainly is a personal
letter, but I know you are interested in all that pertains to us.
Give my love to Viva. I am
so glad you have such a delightful travelling companion as I am sure she
would make. John sends his love to you. I wish you could know
how many times he refers to Mr. Barbour, quoting him and talking so
affectionately of the old Junior League days.
Wish I could see you and hear you
tell about all your fine trip.
Lovingly, as ever
Annie Fellows Johnston |
(This letter is in the Samuel Culbertson
Mansion collection)
Notes:
Lillian may be visiting the places mentioned in "The
Giant Scissors"?
Mamie = Mary Johnston, Annie's
step-daughter. This "invalid" lived another 58 years.
She is as much as anyone, the Joyce Ware of the stories.
John, Annie's step-son, had tuberculosis. He died of it in
1910. He was a primary model for the character Jack Ware.
Speculation here that Mrs. Bliss may have been the real life model
for Mrs. Barnaby in "Mary Ware in Texas"
Boerne, TX, of course, was the Bauer of the story.
The menagerie Annie is describing here found its place in "Mary
Ware, The Little Colonel's Chum" also published in 1908, Chapter
14. Also, no doubt that she had her son John in mind for the
ill-fated Jack Ware character, and she had undoubtedly written "The
Jester's Sword" for John as well before she decided to incorporate
it into the Mary Ware story (see further down the letter).
The real name of the model for Mme Gréville of the Giant
Scissors story.
The
Little Sisters of the Poor is an order of nuns (originating in
France: Les Petites Soeurs des Pauvres) that has long had a
presence in Evansville, IN, Annie Fellows Johnston's 'home
town'. This connection may have had something to do with Annie
incorporating the
French facility in Tours into her Giant
Scissors story. Sister Denisa de la Provence herself had come
from Cincinnati. What we
can say is that there actually was a Sister Denisa, and that was her
real name, as this letter and notes from "Land of the Little
Colonel" (1929) verify. AFJ also uses the incident of
the girl visiting the Little Sisters almost verbatim 20 years later in "Land of the Little
Colonel"
Hallie that this was her cousin
Hallie Burge Jacob. Hallie had been
married five years by this time and we do not know where she was living --
quite possibly with her father, Albert Burge, since when the Jacobs moved
to San Antonio, we know they brought her father with them.
This Site:
Home Page
What's New? Biography of Annie Fellows
Johnston,
Books on Line (Complete
Original Little Colonel Book Series)
The Little Colonel (link to U. Penn))
The
Giant Scissors
Two Little
Knights of Kentucky
The Little Colonel's
House Party
The Little Colonel's
Holidays
The Little Colonel's Hero
The Little Colonel
at Boarding-School
The Little Colonel in
Arizona
The Little
Colonel's Christmas Vacation
The Little Colonel, Maid of
Honor
The Little Colonel's
Knight Comes Riding
Mary Ware, The Little Colonel's
Chum
Mary Ware in Texas
Mary Ware's Promised Land
Check our home page for more titles by AFJ on other sites
The People & Characters:
The Little Colonel, Papa
Jack and Mrs. Sherman, The
Old Colonel, Two Little
Knights of Kentucky,
Two Little Knights of Kentucky(2),
Uncle Sidney & Aunt
Elise, parents of the Two Little Knights of Kentucky,
Grandmother McIntyre,
Aunt Allison, The
Waltons, Rob and Anna
Moore, Betty,
Joyce Ware,
Jack Ware, Mom Beck,
Walker, Katherine Marks,
Gay Melville,
The Lees of Arizona,
Small Parts
Their Final Resting Places
The Places: in Pewee (Lloydsboro) Valley:
Map,
Map 2,
Where it all began, The Locust,
The Beeches
Edgewood,
The Little Colonel's Cottage,
The Railroad Station,
"Lloydsboro Seminary",
Clovercroft, The
Post Office, Churches,
The Haunted House at Hartwell Hollow,
Confederate Home
Rollington,
Minor Places In Old Louisville:
The Culbertson
Mansion, "Home of a Hero" Elsewhere:
The Cuckoo's Nest (Indiana),
Lee's Ranch,
Camelback Mountain &
Hole-in-Rock (Arizona),
San Antonio and
The Little Town of Bauer (Boerne),
Texas,
The Gate of the Giant Scissors (France)
Letters from Annie
Fellows Johnston and "Mrs Walton"
Scrapbook
Links
Cooking with The Little Colonel
Guest Book
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