There is one here in the family who considers me a writer of the darkest dye, and does not approve of it.  Benjy comes and sits most mournfully facing me when I settle down on a sunny morning, such as this, to write:  and inquires, with all the dumbness a dog is capable of—­“What has come between us, that you fill up your time and mine with those cat’s-claw scratchings, when you should be in your woodland dress running [with] me through damp places?”

Having written this sentimental meaning into his eyes, and Benjy still sitting watching me, I was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and took him to see his mother’s grave.  At the bottom of the long walk is our dog’s cemetery:—­no tombstones, but mounds; and a dog-rose grows there and flourishes as nowhere else.  It was my fancy as a child to have it planted:  and I declare to you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if it knew that it had relations of a higher species under its keeping.  Benjy, too, has a profound air of knowing, and never scratches for bones there, as he does in other places.  What horror, were I to find him digging up his mother’s skeleton!  Would my esteem for him survive?

When we got there to-day, he deprecated my choice of locality, asking what I had brought him there for.  I pointed out to him the precise mound which covered the object of his earliest affections, and gathered you these buds.  Are they not a deep color for wild ones?—­if their blush remains a fixed state till the post brings them to you.

Through what flower would you best like to be passed back, as regards your material atoms, into the spiritualized side of nature, when we have done with ourselves in this life?  No single flower quite covers all my wants and aspirations.  You and I would put our heads together underground and evolve a new flower—­“carnation, lily, lily, rose”—­and send it up one fine morning for scientists to dispute over and give diabolical learned names to.  What an end to our cozy floral collaboration that would be!

Here endeth the epistle:  the elect salutes you.  This week, if the authorities permit, I shall be paying you a flying visit, with wings full of eyes,—­and, I hope, healing; for I believe you are seedy, and that that is what is behind it.  You notice I have not complained.  Dearest, how could I!  My happiness reaches to the clouds—­that is, to where things are not quite clear at present.  I love you no more than I ought:  yet far more than I can name.  Good-night and good-morning.—­Your star, since you call me so.

LETTER XVIII.

Dearest:  Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to tell you what I do all day.  Was that to avoid the too great length of my telling you what I think?  Yet you get more of me this way than that.  What I do is every day so much the same:  while what I think is always different.  However, since you want a woman of action rather than of brain, here I start telling you.