d for his upright and noble career.]

LENOX, September 11th, 1839.

Thank you, my dear Lady Dacre, for your kindness in writing to me again.
I would fain know if doing so may not have become a painful effort to
you, or if my letters may not have become irksome to you. Pray have the
real goodness to let me know, if not by your own hand, through our
friends William Harness or Emily Fitzhugh, if you would rather not be
disturbed by my writing to you, and trust that I shall be grateful for
your sincerity.

You know I do not value very highly the artificial civilities which half
strangle half the world with a sort of floss-silk insincerity; and the
longer I live the more convinced I am that real tenderness to others is
quite compatible with the truth that is due to them and one's self.

My regard for you does not maintain itself upon our scanty and
infrequent correspondence, but on the recollection of your kindness to
me, and the impression our former intercourse has left upon my memory;
and though ceasing to receive your letters would be foregoing an
enjoyment, it could not affect the grateful regard I entertain for you.
Pray, therefore, my dear Lady Dacre, do not scruple to bid me hold my
peace, if by taking up your time and attention in your present sad
circumstances [the recent loss of her daughter] I disturb or distress
you.

Your kind wishes for my health and happiness are as completely fulfilled
as such benedictions may be in this world of imperfect bodies and minds.
I ride every day before breakfast, some ten or twelve miles (yesterday
it was five and twenty), and as this obliges me to be in my saddle at
seven in the morning, I am apt to consider the performance meritorious
as well as pleasurable. (Who says that early risers always have a
Pharisaical sense of their own superiority?) I am staying in the
beautiful hill-region of Massachusetts, where I generally spend part of
my summer, in the neighborhood of my friends the Sedgwicks, who are a
very numerous clan, and compose the chief part of the population of this
portion of Berkshire, if not in quantity, certainly in quality.

There was some talk, at one time, of my going to the hot sulphur springs
of Virginia; but the difficulties of the journey thither, and miseries
of a sojourn there, prevented my doing so, as I could not have taken my
children with me. We shall soon begin to think of flying southward, for
we are t