ch 17th, 1839.
MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

I cannot conceive how you could do such a wicked thing as to throw a
letter you had begun into the fire, or such a cruel one as to inform the
person who was to have received it of your exploit.

You burned your account of my sister's first appearance because,
forsooth, the "newspapers" or "Harriet S----" would be sure to afford me
the intelligence! But it so happens that I never see a newspaper, and
that that identical letter of Harriet's was cast away in one of those
unfortunate New York packets blown ashore in the late tremendous gales.
It has since reached me, however; but she, too, thinking fit to go upon
some fallacious calculation of human probabilities, takes it for granted
that Adelaide has written me a full, true, and particular account of the
whole business, and sums up all details in the mere intelligence, which
had already reached me, of her having made a successful first appearance
at Venice. Pray, my dear Mrs. Jameson, do not be afraid of supplying me
with twice-told tales of my own people, but whenever you are good enough
to write to me, let me know all that you know about them....

I do not know why you should have associated the ill-fated
_Pennsylvania_ with any thought of me. I never crossed the Atlantic in a
ship so named, but the _St. Andrew_, one of the wrecked vessels, was the
one in which we returned to America two years ago, and probably you may
have written the one name for the other by mistake.

Of the appearance of your book, and the attention it has excited, I hear
from Catharine Sedgwick. As for me, the only new book I have seen since
my sojourn in these outhouses of civilization, is that exquisite volume
whose evergreen leaves, of every tint and texture, are rustling in the
bright sunshine and fresh sea-breeze of this delicious winter climate.

Art never devised more perfect combinations of form and color than these
wild woods present, with their gigantic growth of evergreen oak, their
thickets of myrtle and magnolia, their fantastic undergrowth of spiked
palmetto, and their hanging draperies of jessamine, whose gold-colored
bells fill the air with fragrance long before one approaches the place
where it grows.

You would laugh if I were to recount some of my manifold avocations
here; my qualifications for my situation should be more various than
those of a modern governess, for it appears to me there is nothing
strange and unusual by way of fema