Whilst in town the other day, I called in the Tenth Street Studio Buildings to ask Mr. Page when he could give a few days of his time to restoring Pickie’s portrait, as it has been somewhat affected by the dampness during the years that it has stood in the house in the woods.  Mr. Page gave me a very amusing account of the difficulty he experienced in obtaining sittings from Pickie.

“Young children,” he said, “are always averse to having their portraits painted, and there is usually a struggle to induce them to submit to the confinement of posing for me; but in Master Pickie’s case, the child was so full of life that I might almost as well have tried to obtain sittings from a butterfly as from him.”

Pickie’s rapid illness and sudden death occurred before the picture was completed, and although Mr. Page worked upon it for some time from memory and from daguerrotypes of the child, a few finishing touches remain to be added.

October 3.

This morning I at last realized what I have been endeavoring to banish from my mind—­that the day of our departure from dear Chappaqua is at hand.  This fact was brought home to me in a very practical manner by the arrival of our immense French trunks from the side-hill house, where they have been stored this summer, and the necessity of packing them, coupled with an intimation from mamma that it would be as well to put my books and music in the bottom, and my dresses in the top of my trunk.  I am somewhat of a novice in packing, for during the preparations for our eight ocean voyages that duty never once fell to my lot; however I flatter myself that such very elementary instructions were not necessary.

Quite tenderly I took down from the shelves the books that I had brought from New York for summer reading, for mingled with every page was some pleasant association.  One chapter in Kohlrausch’s “Germany” seemed still to retain the faint perfume of the pale primroses that I gathered in the meadow that day to mark my stopping-place, and my little volume of Voltaire’s “Charles Douze” recalled an interesting argument upon the relative claims to greatness of that hero, and my hero par excellence, the first Napoleon.

My ponderous volumes of Plato brought before my mind Arthur’s reading, and the life with which he invested the words of these old-time philosophers that had so keen an interest for him; while Madame de Stael’s “Allemagne,” and my little copy of Ehlert’s “Letters on Music” were associated with almost every hour of the day.  They had lain upon my writing-table the entire summer, and it was my habit whenever I laid down my pen for a moment to take up one book or the other, and glance at a page of Ehlert’s criticisms upon opera, symphony, or song, or Madame de Stael’s profound essays upon art, morals, and politics.