dear
inmates. Pray remember me most kindly to Mr. Sullivan, and beg him to
accept my best wishes for his happiness, and that of all who belong to
him; the latter part of my wish I know he is mainly instrumental in
fulfilling himself. May he find his reward accordingly!

Of myself, my dear friend, what shall I tell you? I am in good health,
thank God! and as much good spirits as inevitably belong to good health
and a sound constitution in middle life....

The intense heat of the last month had made both my children ill, and a
week ago they were removed to this place, called the Yellow Springs,
from a fine mineral source, the waters of which people bathe in and
drink. Round it is gathered a small congregation of rambling
farm-houses, built for the accommodation of visitors. The country is
pretty and well cultivated, and the air remarkable for its purity and
healthiness; and here we have taken lodgings, and shall probably remain
during all the heat of the next six weeks, after which I suppose we
shall return to town.

I wish you could see my present _locale_. The house we are in is the
furthest from the "Hotel" (as it is magnificently called), and is a
large, rambling, whitewashed edifice, with tumble-down wooden piazzas
(verandas, as we should call them) surrounding its ground-floor. This
consists of one very large room, intended for a public dining-room, with
innumerable little cells round it, all about twelve feet by thirteen,
which are the bedrooms. One of these spacious sleeping-apartments,
opening on one side to the common piazza and on the other to the common
eating-room, is appropriated to me as a "private parlor," as it is
called; and being at present, most fortunately, the only inmates of this
huge barrack, we have collected into this "extra exclusive" saloon all
the furniture that we could glean out of all the other rooms in the
house; and what do you think we have got? Two tiny wooden tables,
neither of them large enough to write upon; a lame horse-hair sofa, and
six lame wooden chairs. As the latter, however, are not all lame of the
same leg, it is quite a pretty gymnastic exercise to balance one's self
as one sits by turns upon each of them, bringing dexterously into play
all the different muscles necessary to maintain one's seat on any of
them. It makes sitting quite a different process from what I have ever
known it to be, and separates it entirely from the idea usually
connected with it, of rest. But th