Monday, June 21st.—­It is now going on a fortnight since we left home.  Oh, if it were God’s will, how I should love to get well, pay you back some of the debts I owe you, be a better mother to my children, write some more books, and make you love me so you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself!  Just to see how it would seem to be well, and to show you what a splendid creature I could be, if once out of the harness!  A modest little list you will say!...  I said to myself, Is it after all such a curse to suffer and to be a source of suffering to others?  Isn’t it worth while to pay something for warm human sympathies and something for rich experience of God’s love and wisdom?  And I felt, that for you to have a radiant, cheerful, health-happy wife was not, perhaps, so good for you, as a minister of Christ’s gospel, as to have the poor feeble creature whose infirmities keep you anxious and off the top of the wave.

Saturday afternoon the Professor took me off strawberrying again.  Can you believe that till this June I never went strawberrying in my life?  I don’t eat them, so the fun is in the picking.  Do you realise how kind the Professor is to me?  I am afraid I don’t.  He works very hard, too hard, I think; but perhaps he does it as a refuge from his loneliness.  His heart seems still full of tenderness toward Louisa.  Yesterday he took me aside and told me, with much emotion, that he dreamed the night before that she floated towards him with a leaf in her hand, on which she wrote the words “Sabbath peacefulness.”  I love him much, but am afraid of him, as I am of all men—­even of you; you need not laugh, I am.

To Mrs. Smith she writes from Rockaway, July 24th: 

We were glad to hear that you were safely settled at Prout’s Neck, far from riots, if not from rumors thereof.  We have as convenient and roomy and closetty a cottage as possible.  We are within three minutes or so of the beach, and go back and forth, bathe, dig sand, and stare at the ocean according to our various ages and tastes.  I really do not know how else we spend our time.  I sew a little, and am going to sew more when my machine comes; read a little, doze a little, and eat a good deal.  The butcher calls every morning, and so does the baker with excellent bread; twice a week clams call at thirty cents the hundred; we get milk, butter, and eggs without much trouble; and ice and various vegetables without any, as Mrs. Bull sends them to us every day, with sprinklings of fruit, pitchers of cream, herring and whatever is going.  We either sit on the beach looking and listening to the waves, every evening, or we run in to Mrs. Bull’s; or gather about our parlor-table reading.  By ten we are all off to bed.  George does nothing but race back and forth to New York on Seminary business; he has gone now.  I went with him the other day.  The city looks pinched and wo-begone.  We were caught in that tornado and nearly pulled to pieces.