Aug. 28th.—­I made a fire in MY woods yesterday, and another to-day, when I melted glue, and worked at my rustic basket, and felt extremely happy and amiable.

Sept. 13th.—­Miss Warner told me to-night that she thought my Katy story commonplace at the beginning, but that she changed her mind afterward.  Of course I wrote a story about that marigold of G——­ W——­’s and I am dying to inflict it on you.  Then if you like it, hurrah!

To Miss Woolsey, Dorset, Aug. 13, 1868.

I was right glad to get your letter yesterday, and to learn a little of your whereabouts and whatabouts.  You may imagine “him” as seated, spectacles on nose, reading The Nation at one end of the table, and “her” as established at the other.  This table is homely, but has a literary look, got up to give an air to our room; books and papers are artistically scattered over it; we have two bottles of ink apiece, and a box of stamps, a paper cutter and a pen-wiper between us.  Two inevitable vases containing ferns, grasses, buttercups, etc., remind us that we are in the country, and a “natural bracket” regales our august noses with an odor of its own.  A can of peaches without any peaches in it, holds a specimen of lycopodium, and a marvelous lantern that folds up into nothing by day and grows big at night, brings up the rear.  But the most wonderful article in this room is a bookcase made by “him,” all himself, in which may be seen a big volume of Fenelon, Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying, the Recit d’une Soeur, which have you read?  Les Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, Prayers of the Ages, a volume of Goethe, Aristotle’s Ethics and some other Greek books; the Life of Mrs. Fry, etc. etc.  Such a queer hodge-podge of books as we brought with us, and such a book-case!  The first thing “he” ever made for “her” in his mortal life.

Our house isn’t done, and what fun to watch it grow, to discuss its merits and demerits, to grab every check that comes in from magazine and elsewhere, and turn it into chairs and tables and beds and blankets!  Then for “them boys,” what treasures in the way of bits of boards, and what feats of climbing and leaping!  Above all, think of “him” in an old banged-in hat, and “her” in a patched old gown, gathering brushwood in their woods, making it up into heaps, and warming themselves by the fires it is agoing for to make.

“Stick after stick did Goody pull!”

Mr. P. is unusually well.  His house is the apple of his eye, and he is renewing his youth.  Thus far the project has done him a world of good.

To Mrs. Stearns, Dorset, September 13, 1863.