had to draw in my horns a little, but M. and I work generally like two day-laborers for the wages we get, and those wages are flowers here, there and everywhere, to say nothing of ferns, brakes, mosses, scarlet berries, and the like.  And when flowers fail we fall back on different shades of green; the German ivy being relieved by a background of dark foliage, or light grasses against grave ones; and when we hit on any new combination, each summons the other to be lost in admiration.  And when we are too sore and stiff from weeding, grass-shearing or watering, we fall to framing little pictures, or to darning stockings, which she does so beautifully that it has become a fine art with her, or I betake myself to the sewing-machine and stitch for legs that seem to grow long by the minute.

What the rest of the family are about meanwhile, I can not exactly say.  Mr. Prentiss sits in a chair with an umbrella over his head, and pulls up a weed now and then, and then strolls off with a straw in his mouth; he also drives off sometimes on foraging expeditions, and comes back with butter, eggs, etc., and on hot days takes a bath where a stream of cold water dashes over him; “splendid” he says, and “horrid” I say.  The boys are up to everything; they are carpenters, and plumbers, and trouters, and harnessers, and drivers; H. has just learned to solder, and saves me no little trouble and expense by stopping leakages; heretofore every holey vessel had to be sent out of town.  Both boys have gardens and sell vegetables to their father at extraordinary prices, and they are now filling up a deep ditch 500 feet long at a “York shilling” an hour—­men get a “long shilling” and do the work no better.  With the money thus made they buy tools of all sorts, seeds and fruit trees, but no nonsense.  Three happier children than these three can not be found....

You may be interested, too, to know what are the famous works of art we are framing, as above referred to.  Well, photographs of our kindred and friends for one thing:  my brothers, my husband’s mother and other relatives of his, Prof. and Mrs. Smith, Mr. and Mrs. B. B., and so on, a good deal as it has happened, for everybody hasn’t been photographed; and some bodies have not given us their pictures—­you, for instance, and if you want to be hung as high as Haman in my den, nine feet square, where I write, why, you can.  Last summer I had a mania for illuminating, and made about a cord of texts and mottoes; I can’t paint, so I cut letters out of red, blue and black paper, and deceived thereby the very elect, for even Mrs. Washburn was taken in, and said they were painted nicely.

Your little note has drawn large interest, hasn’t it?  Well, it deserved its fate.

Hardly had she finished this letter when she was taken very ill.  For a while it seemed as if the time of her departure had come.  At her request the children were called to her bedside, and she gave them in turn her dying counsels, bade them live for Christ as the only true, abiding good, and then kissed each of them good-bye.  She was much disappointed on finding that her sickness, after all, was not an “invitation” from the Master.  “You don’t get away this time,” said her husband to her, half playfully, half exultingly, referring to her eagerness to go.