My only comfort is the hope of your return in
the spring. Then I hope to be well enough to show Mr Hawthorne all
the holes and corners my own self. Tell him so. I am already about
to study the State Trials, and make myself perfect in all that can
assist the romance. It will be a labor of love to do for him the
small and humble part of collecting facts and books, and making
ready the palette for the great painter.

Talking of _artists_, one was here on Sunday who was going to Upton
yesterday. His object was to sketch every place mentioned in my
book. Many of the places (as those round Taplow) he had taken, and
K---- says he took this house and the stick and Fanchon and probably
herself. I was unluckily gone to take home the dear visitors who
cheer me daily and whom I so wish you to see.

God bless you all, dear friends.

Ever most affectionately yours, M.R.M.

Swallowfield, September 24, 1852

My Very Dear Mr. Fields: I am beginning to get very fidgety about
you, and thinking rather too often, not only of the breadth of the
Atlantic, but of its dangers. However I must hear soon, and I write
now because I am expecting a fellow-townsman of yours, Mr. Thompson,
an American artist, who expected to find you still in England, and
who is welcomed, as I suppose all Boston would be ... People do not
love you the less, dear friend, for missing you.

I write to you this morning, because I have something to say and
something to ask. In the first place, I am better. Mr. Harness, who,
God bless him, left that Temple of Art, the Deepdene, and Mr. Hope's
delightful conversation, to come and take care of me, stayed at
Swallowfield three weeks. He found out a tidy lodging, which he has
retained, and he promises to come back in November; at present he is
again at the Deepdene. Nothing could be so judicious as his way of
going on; he came at two o'clock to my cottage and we drove out
together; then he went to his lodgings to dinner, to give me three
hours of perfect quiet; at eight he and the Russells met here to
tea, and he read Shakespeare (there is no such reader in the world)
till bedtime. Under his treatment no wonder that I improved, but the
low-fever is not far off; doing a little too much, I fell back even
before his departure, and have been worse since. However, on the
whole, I a