I have done nothing but tear my hair ever since you left, to think I let you go.  It would have been so easy to send you to Manchester to-morrow morning, after a night here, and an evening over our little wood-fire, but we were so glad to see you both, so bewildered by your sudden appearance, that neither of us thought of it till you were gone.  And now you are still within reach, and we want you to reconsider your resolution to turn your backs upon us after such a long, fatiguing journey, and eating no salt with us.  I did not urge your staying because I do so hate to be urged myself.  But I want you to feel what a great pleasure it would be to us if you could make up your minds to stay at least over Sunday, or if to-morrow and Sunday are unpleasant, just a day or two more, to take our favorite drives with us, and give us what you may never have a chance to give us again.  I declare I shall think you are crazy, if you don’t stay a few days, now that you are here.  We have been longing to have you come, and only waiting for our place to be a little less naked in order to lay violent hands on you; but now you have seen the nakedness of the land, we don’t care, but want you to see more of it.  This is the time, and exactly the time, when we have nothing to do but to enjoy our visitors, and next year the house may be running over.  And if you don’t come now, you’ll have the plague of having to come some other time, and it is a long, formidable journey.

Why didn’t we just take and lock you up when we had hold of you!  Well, now I’ve torn out all my hair, and people will be saying, “Go up, thou bald-head.”  Besides—­you left them bunch-berries! and do you suppose you can go home without them?  Why, it wouldn’t be safe.  You would be run off the track, and scalded by steam, and broken all to pieces, and caught on the cow-catcher, and get lost, and be run away with, and even struck by lightning, I shouldn’t wonder.  And now if you go in to-morrow’s train you’ll catch the small-pox and the measles and the scarlet fever and the yellow fever, and all the colors-in-the-rainbow fever, and go into a consumption and have the pleurisy, and the jaundice and the tooth-ache and the headache, and, above all, the conscience-ache.  And you never ate any of our corn or our beans!  You never so much as asked the receipt for our ironclads!  You haven’t seen our cow.  You haven’t been down cellar.  You haven’t fished in our brook.  You haven’t been here at all, now I come to think of it.  I dreamed you flew through, but it was nothing but a dream.  And the houses have a habit of burning down, and ours is going to do as the rest do, and then how’ll you feel in your minds?  And when folks set themselves up against us, and won’t let us have our own way, why then “I tell my daughter

  What makes folks do as they’d oughter not,
  And why don’t they do as they’d oughter?”

And we all pine away and die like the babes in the woods, and nobody’s left to cover us up with leaves.  Send all these arguments home by telegram, and your folks will shoot you if you dare to go.  I could write another sheet if it would do any good.  Now do lay my words to heart, and come right back.