Pencilled note: 'Tell Mama I am Mr McGregor, & I am missin' her — Dilly'

A small piece of cream-colored paper, photographed alone on the scanner — likely a keepsake note pasted into the album, separately mounted. The whole message is written across it in soft graphite in a flowing adult hand, enclosed in quotation marks as if recording a child’s dictated words. ‘Dilly’ is a household nickname, almost certainly for one of the Walker children (a sibling of the ‘Pickens’ who signs the following page). The reference to ‘Mr McGregor’ is to the gardener in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), a popular nursery book of the period.

The enclosing quotation marks suggest the message is a transcribed dictation of the child’s own words; the underlined “Dilly” is the signature. The dropped g in missin’ is preserved as the child spoke it. The reference is to Mr. McGregor, the gardener in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902).