Stockton Axson to Jessie Woodrow Wilson Sayre

I have a joke on you. Your card came this morning and it announces that you will all “start home on the eighteenth” [italics mine]. Now I know that's a mistake of course, for only the other day a letter from your mother spoke of returning on the date originally set—namely the eighth. But I know how it is that you came to write that eenth. You have so recently passed an important date in your young career that the magic number sticks in your brain and slips unconsciously from your pen.
And now I want to take this occasion to congratulate you on attaining to this age of joy, dear eighteen-year-old girl. For to you it is of course an age of joy, though I fancy that many of us who love you are a little reluctant to see the years sweep you out of girlhood into womanhood. For my own part I could almost wish that we could go back to the days of your babyhood. But that is a selfish wish because there is something in us which makes us glad to come to the years of our majority and independence, and I daresay you are happier at eighteen than you were at eight, for you have your mind and heart and soul filled with so many and so much nobler interests than you had in the thoughtless years of your childhood; and so I congratulate you heartily and I hope that you may live to see a great many more birthday anniversaries and be happier in each one than you were in the one which preceeded.
How well I remember your first birthday, the real birthday in the old frame hotel in Gainesville. Do you know that when I had my first look at you you smiled. I fancy that is a very unusual thing for such a tiny bit of a baby to do but you did it. And my second recollection of you is of you lying in your nurse's arms and Margaret toddling across the floor to look gravely at you for a moment and then smacking you in the face with her tiny fist. You did not reciprocate then, but in the immediate years that followed you held your own very well in those sisterly encounters. But that all belongs to ancient history—or perhaps we might say to the Dark Ages.
God bless you, dear Jessie, and give you a long life and a happy one.
I had a letter from your father forwarded from Kansas telling me of the list, and I am sorry I had to trouble you again though glad to get your card. Mr. Harper is not in town but I got the list from Mr. Long.
With more love than I know how to express for you, for Nellie, and for your father and mother,