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 The author of this odd manifesto (here reproduced with strict textual exactitude from the frayed original) was the author of the foregoing story, then just three months short of nine years old. The door on which it appeared was that of the room in which, on a small typewriter, she wrote down the adventures of Eepersip; and the week in which it appeared was that in which these adventures had their beginning.

She finished them, in the same room, three months later, early in the March of her ninth completed year and a few days after her birthday. One of her curious, slightly un-American inventions, I must here explain, was the concept of her own birthday as an annual occasion for handing out things to the other members of her family. She planned this story from the beginning as a gift for her mother on March 4. Would her mother "like" it, though? On that point there would have to be a disinterested opinionas it happened, mine. With intense secrecy, behind the latched door of that room guarded by the constrained preparatory notice, she read me the instalments as they were produced.

My candid guess was that her mother would indeed "like" it. I liked it myself, if only as unconscious expression of a radiant physical vitality