r.

"I am going to begin to enjoy the summer now, and to read foolish
novels, if I can get any, and smoke cigars, and think of nothing at
all; which is equivalent to thinking of all manner of things."

The composition of the "Tanglewood Tales" gave him pleasant employment,
and all his letters, during the period he was writing them, overflow
with evidences of his felicitous mood. He requests that Billings should
pay especial attention to the drawings, and is anxious that the porch of
Tanglewood should be "well supplied with shrubbery." He seemed greatly
pleased that Mary Russell Mitford had fallen in with his books and had
written to me about them. "Her sketches," he said, "long ago as I read
them, are as sweet in my memory as the scent of new hay." On the 18th of
August he writes:--

"You are going to publish another thousand of the Seven Gables. I
promised those Pyncheons a preface. What if you insert the
following?

"(The author is pained to learn that, in selecting a name for the
fictitious inhabitants of a castle in the air, he has wounded the
feelings of more than one respectable descendant of an old Pyncheon
family. He begs leave to say that he intended no reference to any
individual of the name, now or heretofore extant; and further, that,
at the time of writing his book, he was wholly unaware of the
existence of such a family in New England for two hundred years
back, and that whatever he may have since learned of them is
altogether to their credit.)

"Insert it or not, as you like. I have done with the matter."

I advised him to let the Pyncheons rest as they were, and omit any
addition, either as note or preface, to the romance.

Near the close of 1851 his health seemed unsettled, and he asked me to
look over certain proofs "carefully," for he did not feel well enough
to manage them himself. In one of his notes, written from Lenox at that
time, he says:--

"Please God, I mean to look you in the face towards the end of next
week; at all events, within ten days. I have stayed here too long
and too constantly. To tell you a secret, I am sick to death of
Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here. But I
must. The air and climate do not agree with my health at all; and,
for the first time since I was a boy, I have felt languid and
dispirited during almost my whole residence here. O that Providence