Lomond once, as could be inflicted upon me
by this American sky. The women here, who are careful, above all things,
of their appearance, marvel extremely at my exposing myself to the
horrors of tanning, freckling, etc.; but with hair and eyes as dark as
mine, a gipsy complexion doesn't signify, and I prefer burning my skin
to suffocating under silk handkerchiefs, sun-bonnets, and two or three
gauze veils, and sitting, as the ladies here do, in the dark till the
sun has declined. I am certainly more like a Red Indian squaw than when
last you saw me; but that change doesn't signify, it's only skin
deep....

You speak of the beauty of the Italian sky, and say that to pass the
mornings with such pictures, and the evenings with such sunsets, is
matter to be grateful for.

I have been spending a month with my friends, the Sedgwicks, in a
beautiful hilly region in the State of Massachusetts; and I never looked
abroad upon the woods and valleys and lakes and mountains without
thinking how great a privilege it was to live in the midst of such
beautiful things. I felt this the more strongly, perhaps, because the
country in my own neighborhood here is by no means so varied and
interesting.

I am glad you are to have the pleasure of meeting your own people
abroad, and thus carrying your home with you: give my kindest love to
them all whenever you see them....

I have not been hot this summer: the weather has been rainy and cold to
a most uncommon degree; and I have rejoiced therefore, and so have the
trees and the grass, which have contrived to look green to the end of
the chapter, as with us....

If I am not allowed to go to the South this winter, it is just possible
that I may spend three months in England.

Good-bye, my dearest H----.

I am ever yours,
F. A. B.

[This was the last letter I wrote to my friend from America this
year; it was decided that I should not go to the South, and so
lonely a winter as I should have had to spend in the country being
rather a sad prospect, it was also decided that I should return to
England, and remain during my temporary widowhood with my own family
in London.

I sailed at the beginning of November, and reached England, after a
frightfully stormy passage of eight and twenty days. I and my
child's nurse were the only women on board the packet, and ther