2110-7-7-2

[Copy]

GOVERNMENT HOUSE OTTAWA.

Dec. 5, 1935. Thursday.

My darling Baba

Please please don't think you write me too many letters. You can't have any idea how I long for them, and read and re-read them. Marnie too has been most awfully good, and I do so lovingly thank you for the trouble you take because I know it is a lot of trouble to write when you have the house full and are snowed under with telephones etc; believe me I do appreciate it to the full.

[the next paragraph is typed but has 3 lines striking it out] I wonder if Gertrude could get me some tiny thing for Thérèse - a chiffon handkerchief with her initial on it for about 5/- or anything else of that sort? I should be so grateful.

I wrote to you on the train between Montreal and Toronto, and again at Toronto, which town greeted us with marvellous warmth of welcome. But oh I was tired when we left. We finished up at a Highland Ball where in an inferno of heat and noise I tried to talk to the various kilted gentlemen who were brought up to me. Then we went in to supper where I had to slash a sordid looking haggis with a dirk! We stood and shook hands endlessly. Beatrice and I lunched out with very nice people endlessly, in houses

(Dec. 5. 1935.)

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where all the academy pictures of the 1870s seem to have found a resting place (cows: mists etc.). People came to dinner, we went out to dinner etc., etc., you know the sort of thing. The 'high spot' to me was a tea party of Women's Institute Members, all such nice country women - and one was an Indian, beautiful to look at and with a lovely voice. She said to me, "We used to put paint and feathers on our heads, now we move with the times," and she begged me to come down to the Seven Nations Reservation in Ontario and see the Indian Women's Institute members.

Since we returned we have been struggling with Christmas presents. If you hear of anyone having to pay duty on anything I send, will you very kindly ask them to send me a line? But I hope it won't happen. I think I shall be reduced to sending mostly handkerchiefs as no one seems to mind what one sends in that way!

We had a perfectly marvellous afternoon by Kingsmere Lake which was thinly coated with ice and which looks like a sheet of oxydised silver. The white trunks of the bushes stand out like ghosts against the blue shadows on the snow. John saw a red breasted gros beak on a tree, but there is very little bird life.

John Boyle and Alastair and I and Augustus (the

[Dec. 5. 1935.]

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Aberdeen puppy) slithered along the road and I managed to rub a hole in my heel. It is almost all right, but is particularly annoying because I can't walk much, and today with the marvellous blue sky and sunshine I long to walk.

Beatrice and I are rather worried about our clothes as we are plunged into a Court mourning for six weeks and we haven't either of us got enough black to go on with! She is having a marvellous time and is already immensely popular in Ottawa.

Alastair went out skiing for the first time yesterday afternoon. He nearly got his ears frost bitten, but Eric Mackenzie and a mounted police officer rubbed them with snow. He looks most awfully nice in his ski clothes. John looks so well and is in very good spirits.

The air is very electric. If you touch a door handle or electric light switch it snaps at you and you jump.

Eric Mackenzie is so pleased that the flowers are all right.

Much much love.

from (Signed)

SUSIE.