from every sight and sound, for my senses are almost worn out, and my sense exhausted, with looking, hearing, feeling, going, doing, being, and suffering.  Our work is incessant; we never remain a month in any one place, and we are scarce off our knees from putting things into drawers than we are down on them again to take them out and put them all back into trunks.  My health has not suffered hitherto from this constant exertion, but I am occasionally oppressed with the dreadful unquietness of our life, and long for a few moments’ rest of body and of mind.

This is our first visit to this place, and I am enchanted with it.  As a town, it bears more resemblance to an English city than any we have yet seen; the houses are built more in our own fashion, and there is a beautiful walk called the Common, the features of which strongly resemble the view over the Green Park just by Constitution Hill.  The people here take more kindly to us than they have done even elsewhere, and it is delightful to act to audiences who appear so pleasantly pleased with us....

Only think! a book was sent to me from Philadelphia the other day which proved to be the “Diary of an Ennuyee.”  I have no idea who it came from, or who made so good a guess at that old predilection of mine.  I fell to forthwith—­for that book has always had a most powerful charm for me—­and read, and read on, though I have read it many a time through before, and though I had been acting Bianca, and my supper was on my plate before me.

I heard the other day mention of another work of yours, since the Shakespeare book.  If you are not weary of writing to me, with such long intervals between your question and my reply, tell me something of this new work in your next letter.

Our plans for the summer are yet unsettled....  I was much disappointed on arriving here to find that Dr. Channing has left Boston for the South.  His health is completely broken, and the bleak and bitter east wind that blows perpetually here is a formidable enemy to life, even in stronger frames than his....

The hotel in which we are lodging here is immediately opposite the box-office, and it is a matter of some agreeable edification to me to see the crowds gathering round the doors for hours before they open, and then rushing in, to the imminent peril of life and limb, pushing and pommeling and belaboring one another like madmen.  Some of the lower class of purchasers, inspired by the thrifty desire for gain said to be a New England characteristic, sell these tickets, which they buy at the box-office price, at an enormous advance, and smear their clothes with treacle and sugar and other abominations, to secure, from the fear of their contact of all decently-clad competitors, freer access to the box-keeper.  To prevent, if possible, these malpractices, and secure, to ourselves and the managers of the theater any such surplus