e minds,--a desire to look
through the haze of this mundane atmospheric environment, and predict
the future. But, alas I there is an infirmity of vision; we see through
a glass darkly. We can't see through a millstone. The firmament has
been very like that, for some days,--all compact with clouds. We thought
something was grinding for us. "Now it is coming!" we said last evening.
But no. It was no go,--or no come, rather. And this morning, at the
breakfast table, sitting up [300] there, clothed, and in my right mind,
I said to my sister, "I am not a-going to predict about the weather any
more!"

Ask my dear M., pray her, to try to come up to the height of that great
resolution. I know the difficulty,-the strain to which it will put all
her faculties; but ask her, implore her, to try.

To his Daughters, then living in London Terrace, New York.

1868.

Sr. DAVID'S sends a challenge to all the Terrace birds.

Show us a bird that sings in the night. We have a nightingale,--a bird
that has sung, for two evenings past, between ten and twelve, as gayly
as the nightingales of Champel. It is the cat-bird, the same that
comes flying and pecking at our windows. What has come over the little
creature? I suppose the season of nest-building and incubation is one
of great excitement,--the bird's honeymoon. And then, the full moon
shining down, and the nights warm as summer, and thoughts of the nice
new house and the pretty eggs, and the chicks that are coming,--it could
not contain itself.

Well, as I sit in my porch and look at the birds, they seem to me a
revelation, as beautiful, if not so profound, as the Apocalypse. What
but Goodness could have made a creature at once so beautiful and so
happy? Mansel and Spencer may talk about the incomprehensibility of
the First Cause; I say, here is manifestation. The little Turdus
Felivox,--oho! ye ignorant children, that is he of the cat,--it sits
on the bough, ten feet from me, and sings and trills and whistles, and
sends [301] out little jets of music, little voluntaries, as if it were
freely and irrepressibly singing a lovely hymn.

This morning there is the slightest little drizzle, a mere tentative
experimenting towards rain, no more,-I keep to facts. Well, all the
township is saying, no doubt, "Now it is coming!" Catch me a-doing so! I
was left to say, in an unguarded moment, "If C. had mowed his meadow
two or three days ago, he would have got it all in dry." I feel a little