To Mrs. James Donaghe, Dorset, July 15, 1876.

I have hardly put pen to paper since I came here.  I never could endure heat; it always laid me flat.  Yesterday there was a let-up to the torrid zone, and to-day it is comparatively cool.  Yesterday the mother of our pastor here got her release.  I cried for joy, for she has been a great sufferer, and had longed to die.  What a mystery death is!  I went in to see how she was, and she had just breathed her last, and there lay her poor old body, eighty-two years old, looking as rent and torn as one might suppose it would after a fight of thirty years between the soul and itself.  I have wondered if the heat, so dreadful to many, had not been good for you.  A rheumatic boy, who works for us off and on, says it has been splendid for him.  We heard yesterday that Dr. Schaff had lost his eldest daughter after a ten days’ illness with typhoid fever.  He has been greatly afflicted again and again and again by such bereavements, but this must be hardest of all. [11] There is a different religious atmosphere here now from anything we have ever known.  The ladies hoped to begin the Bible-readings right off, but it was out of the question.  I expect such a number of guests this week that I dare not undertake it.  I wish you were coming, too.  How you would enjoy sitting on the piazza watching the shadows on the mountains!  We have had some magnificent sunsets this season.  Mr. Prentiss and I drive every night after tea, a regular old Darby and Joan.  Generally, I prefer working in the garden to driving, but this time it has been too hot, and we have next to no flowers.  It quite grieves me that I have nothing to lay on Grandma Pratt’s coffin.  However, she won’t care! Won’t it be nice to get rid of these frail, troublesome bodies of ours, and live without them!  I hope I shall see you in heaven, with plenty of room and no rheumatism.  How could you make such a time over that doggerel! [12] Such things are a drug in this house.  I thought I had a long letter from you, and it was that stuff!  My last book is all printed.  My husband kindly corrected the proof-sheets for me; a thing I hate to do.  He likes the book better than I do.  I always get tired of my books by the time they are done.  I read very little; only some few devotional books over and over.  I wonder if you have read “Miracles of Faith”?  It is a remarkable little book.  Do write and let me know how you and your husband are.  We make great account of our afternoon mail.

She alludes in the preceding letter to the guests she was expecting.  The entertainment of friends formed a marked feature of her Dorset life; and it called into play the brightest traits of her character.  Her visitors always went away feeling like one who has been gazing upon a beautiful landscape or listening to sweet music, so charming was her hospitality.  One of them, writing to her husband a year after her death, thus refers to it: