’——­ is quite bent on trying his experiment.  I hope he may succeed; but as they were talking the other evening, I thought of the river, and all the pretty symbols the tide-mill presents, and felt if I could at all adjust the economics to the more simple procedure, I would far rather be the miller, hoping to attract by natural affinity some congenial baker, “und so weiter.”  However, one thing seems sure, that many persons will soon, somehow, somewhere, throw off a part, at least, of these terrible weights of the social contract, and see if they cannot lie more at ease in the lap of Nature.  I do not feel the same interest in these plans, as if I had a firmer hold on life, but I listen with much pleasure to the good suggestions.’

* * * * *

’Oct. 19th, 1840. ——­ was here.  Generally I go out of the room when he comes, for his great excitability makes me nervous, and his fondness for detail is wearisome.  But to-night I was too much fatigued to do anything else, and did not like to leave mother; so I lay on the sofa while she talked with him.

’My mind often wandered, yet ever and anon, as I listened again to him, I was struck with admiration at the compensations of Nature.  Here is a man, isolated from his kind beyond any I know, of an ambitious temper and without an object of tender affections and without a love or a friend.  I don’t suppose any mortal, unless it be his aged mother, cares more for him than we do,—­scarce any value him so much.  The disease, which has left him, in the eyes of men, a scathed and blighted tree, has driven him back to Nature, and she has not refused him sympathy.  I was surprised by the refinement of his observations on the animals, his pets.  He has carried his intercourse with them to a degree of perfection we rarely attain with our human friends.  There is no misunderstanding between him and his dogs and birds; and how rich has been the acquaintance in suggestion!  Then the flowers!  I liked to hear him, for he recorded all their pretty ways,—­not like a botanist, but a lover.  His interview with the Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain was most romantic.  And what he said of the Yuca seems to me so pretty, that I will write it down, though somewhat more concisely than he told it:—­

’"I had kept these plants of the Yuca Filamentosa six or seven years, though they had never bloomed.  I knew nothing of them, and had no notion of what feelings they would excite.  Last June I found in bud the one which had the most favorable exposure.  A week or two after, another, which was more in the shade, put out flower-buds, and I thought I should be able to watch them, one after the other; but, no! the one which was most favored waited for the other, and both flowered together at the full of the moon.  This struck me as very singular, but as soon as I saw the flower by moonlight I understood it.  This flower