“Alone in my cuddy with no one near me I and my thoughts are struggling with each other,” Pearl wrote in late fall or early winter. “My thoughts have drifted off in a dream world. They have got the better of me. They keep drifting to that Nobody. In twilight hours my thoughts form swiftly of one fancy and then the other of him. They have woven a strong cord around my heart which seems never to be broken. I keep thinking of him and can’t help it. Aw shucks, he is in mind morning, noon and night. What makes me keep picturing him in my mind — his look, his ways, his talk and every thing about him — and what it all means, I can’t tell. I never thought of any one else as I do him. I can’t account for the uneasy feeling around my heart unless it is, I love him. Oh God, can it be I love him? Lord this has slipped upon me unexpected. Oh what sorrow it brought. It would have been a blessing to any one else, but to me it will eat my heart away. I guess I have loved him from urchin days but never realized it till just now. No hopes what ever of winning his love. God, what I have to suffer and why it is I can’t tell. I haven’t done any thing to any one that I would be chasened for, but God’s will be done. It’s a higher power above that controls our nature. We love whether it’s our wishes our not. I know it isn’t my will to love the one I do. It came with such a shock as if from the streaks of lightning. It shot through my weak body and unnerved me so I haven’t hardly recovered from the shock yet for it was all so strange and new and I’m not quite used to it yet.”

     “Winter passed on with her sleet and snow,” Pearl continued, perhaps in the spring. “I care but a little for the wind’s loud roar for I’m near the old fire place. I sit there sadly dreaming of my one love here no more. Aw, I dream of a bright future of happy moments I may spend with him when he returns home. My, the winter is gone before I hardly knew it for I heard every few days some thing of my Ideal man but I didn’t know he was till long after he had gone. As you know from girlhood days, I have had my Ideal for he is the one boy for me by and by. I have pictured my sweet many times — his height, his eyes, his weight, and last of all the color of his hair, but never dreamed of him being in miles of here, but when I did awaken I awoke with a shock to think I had known him a many a long day and had learned to love him very dearly before I knew it.”

     “Well, spring is here,” Pearl next wrote. “I have changed places but he is in my mind all the long spring days but I love him better each day and each day that passes I think I can’t love him any better but the dawning day brings on a stronger love than the preceding day. I guess there’s no limit to this love of mine.”

     “Spring days are slipping by as if on wings,” Pearl wrote, a little later. “The fleeter they are, the closer the summer draws nearer, the quicker I will get to see my honey for I have heard he will be here about the 26th of July.”