“I got on splendidly this time, and was quite ready to start with my cousins when the time came, although my Lady Alice evinced serious objections to the gate, and preferred ambling gently along sideways up the hill.  After a while I intimated kindly with my whip a desire to gallop.  I fear that, like some of our friends, she is hard to take a hint, for she progressed by the most wonderful plunges, garnished with little kicks; but I kept her head well up, and clawed out several handfuls of her mane.  When we came to the rendezvous, my cavalier proposed running her for two or three miles to take down her spirits a little, after which she went beautifully, and I never enjoyed a ride so much before.

“We rode to Lake Wampus, and everything looked so lovely, for the full moon lighted it up like a mirror, and we had singing and thrilling ghost stories.

“Dear me, how awfully long this letter is!  Be sure you answer it soon.

“Yours lovingly,

“GABRIELLE.”

June 19.

The heat and dust are becoming insufferable, for we have had no rain, save in very homoeopathic doses, during the three weeks that we have been here.  The shrubs and bushes by the roadside look so piteous under their weight of dust, that I feel half inclined to try the effect of a feather brush upon their drooping leaves; and Bernard, who is never prone to take cheerful views of anything, grows daily more gloomy when we inquire after the progress of the kitchen-garden.  But, although we are sighing under the heat, it is nothing, we are told, to what the New Yorkers are now enduring, and our friends, Mrs. Acheson and Dr. Taylor, who came out yesterday from the city to spend the day with us, congratulated us upon the coolness of the temperature at Chappaqua.

The morning was passed out of doors playing croquet and walking

  “Sotto i pini del boschetto,”

to use the words of the coquettish Countess and her arch waiting-maid in the “Marriage of Figaro” (that Letter Duo contains, I think, some of the most delicious music that the joyous Mozart ever wrote).

The sun was too hot after our early dinner, for us to find much pleasure in croquet; so we sat in the music-room, and upon the piazza, and listened to a few songs from Marguerite, and watched the skill of papa and the handsome blond doctor in the “Magic Rings,”—­a very easy game, to all appearance, but one which really requires much dexterity of hand.

The music-room is, I think, the coolest and pleasantest room in the house.  It is one of the additions built by uncle after he had purchased this house—­a large, square room on the ground floor, with curtained windows opening upon the balcony, and upon the old apple-tree.  It is singularly favorable for music, for it contains no heavy furniture, and the floor is uncarpeted.  We had intended to remove all the pictures from the walls, that they might not deaden the sound of the music, but we could not resist an exquisite “Mary in the Desert,” purchased by uncle in Florence, in 1851; so this painting is now hung over the piano.