Well, good-bye, little book, it’s time for dinner.
Well, I have been having a very remarkable experience, and not only myself and Pa, but all the United States as well; the excitement spread all over the country. I am going to put this down to tell my grandchildren about, for I hope they never will have such a time as we all have had for the past few weeks. I went with Pa to do a little shopping because my dearest girl friend, Mary Potter, of Brookline, had a birthday, and I did, at last, but such a time. I went to the counter where diamond rings were displayed and selected a beauty—Pa said he could not have picked out a better one for the money himself—and I took my purse, opened it to get the $200 to pay for my friend’s present, when I found my purse empty but for a few small silver pieces. I gasped for breath and told Pa. He looked at the purse and declared he knew it was clasped tight when he took it from his pocket inside his vest to give me, and I knew I placed three hundred in one hundred dollar bills in the purse before I started. Pa got the three new bills at my bank that very morning, but they were gone, and no sign of how, or when.
Pa said: “Never mind, Elsie, I have some money myself, also I happen to have my check-book, so you can have the ring just the same. I don’t care for the loss of that three hundred dollars so much as the peculiar way of its disappearance, but perhaps you left it at home in your room.” The clerk said I could telephone and ask, which I did. Ma answered the phone and looked in my room and asked the servants, but no money was found, or had been seen. Well, Pa took out his pocketbook and said I could have what bills he had, which was one hundred and fifty dollars, and give a check for the other fifty, so while he was talking he was opening his pocketbook, and he too started, and gasped for breath, for no bills were to be found, nothing but two silver quarters did Pa’s pocketbook contain, and they were as mum as oysters. Pa said: “Elsie, I don’t understand this. Child, we have been robbed since we left home, but I am at a loss how and when; I am also sure I had one hundred and fifty dollars, besides these quarters, in my pocketbook, but they are all that is left to tell the tale, and they don’t tell it.” We both laughed like two kids—I felt like crying, and Pa said the cold shivers were playing up and down his spine. So he wrote a check for the two hundred dollars and I took the ring and we went directly home and told Ma. Poor Ma couldn’t understand it any more than we did.