dramatic passion made her exclaim: "ALIVE! ALIVE! alive!
alive!"

Well, you are such a nomadic cosmopolitan, that I won't answer for you;
but I will be bound it is so with. Mrs. Bryant, and I guess Julia too.
How you all are, and how she is especially, is the question in all our
hearts; and without waiting for forty things to be done, all working you
like forty-power presses, pray write us three words and tell us.

. . . I hope that some time in the winter I shall get a sight of you.
You and the Club would make my measure full. And yet Boston is great.

To Mrs. David Lane.

BOSTON, Sept. 20, 1858.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Dr. Jackson is fast turning me into a vegetable,-homo
multi-cotyledonous is the species. My head is a cabbage--brain,
cauliflower; my eyes are two beans, with a short cucumber between them,
for a nose; my heart is a squash (very soft); my lungs--cut a watermelon
in two, lengthwise, and you have them; [249]my legs are cornstalks,
and my feet, potatoes. I eat nothing but these things, and I am
fast becoming nothing else. I am potatoes and corn and cucumber and
cabbage,--like the chameleon, that takes the color of the thing it lives
on. Dr. Jackson will have a great deal to answer for to the world. Had
n't you better come into town and see about it? Perhaps you can arrest
the process. . . .

I declare I think it is too bad to send such a poor dish to you as this,
and especially in your loneliness; but it is all. Dr. Jackson's fault.

Think of mosquito-bars in Boston! They must be very trying things--to
the mosquitoes. You see they don't know what to make of it; and very
likely their legs and wings get caught sometimes in the "decussated,
reticulated interstices," as Dr. Johnson calls them. At any rate, from
their noise, they evidently consider themselves as the most ill-treated
and unfortunate outcasts upon earth. Paganini wrote the "Carnival
of Venice." I wonder somebody does n't write the no-carnival of the
mosquitoes.

To the Same.

BOSTON, Dec. 30, 1858.

DEAR MY FRIEND,--I cannot let the season of happy wishes pass by without
sending mine to you and yours. But you must begin to gather up patience
for your venerable friend, for the happy anniversaries somehow begin to
gather shadows around them; they are both reminders and admonishers.

Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the "Happy New Year!" is never
sounded out in the minor key; always it has a ring of joyousness and
hope in it. Read that [