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refreshments we all sank back again into habitual gloom. The Sfollati because they had lost their home and much else besides; the 'devoted friend' because her son was a prisoner in Germany; N. because she wished that we had gone away when it was still possible; and I, because I should have much preferred spending the day alone.

In the very midst of this dubious cheer the little French child who had partaken copiously of a solid gouté made especially for her, burst into tears. She was homesick, she sobbed, because she had seen the name of her natal French town on a map we had given her to look at. 'She always cries when looking at a map', said someone. But I was quite sure that she was also crying because N.'s Christmas present had proved such a dismal failure. It was a book evidently written for horrid little boys and not for nice blond little French bonnes-femmes; a book with an awful combined Italian and Indian name, containing scratchy illustrations of the wildest kind of American Indians: stalking, killing, being killed and tied to trees with arrows sticking into their nude bodies. A truly horrible book: Natalie had gone down town to buy this and other presents. She became bewildered not by an 'embarras de choix' but rather by a general scarcity. 'I was really looking for 'Tom Sawyer',[[strikethrough]] by Fenimore Cooper [[strikethrough]],' said bemuddled [[/strikethrough]] N.
N. brought me back a very well made black and white wooden box and I gave her a hand microscope made of some sort of