ife, but I listen with much pleasure to the
good suggestions.'

* * * * *

'_Oct. 19th, 1840._ ---- was here. Generally I go out of
the room when he comes, for his great excitability makes
me nervous, and his fondness for detail is wearisome. But
to-night I was too much fatigued to do anything else, and
did not like to leave mother; so I lay on the sofa while she
talked with him.

'My mind often wandered, yet ever and anon, as I listened
again to him, I was struck with admiration at the
compensations of Nature. Here is a man, isolated from his
kind beyond any I know, of an ambitious temper and without an
object of tender affections and without a love or a friend. I
don't suppose any mortal, unless it be his aged mother, cares
more for him than we do,--scarce any value him so much. The
disease, which has left him, in the eyes of men, a scathed and
blighted tree, has driven him back to Nature, and she has not
refused him sympathy. I was surprised by the refinement of
his observations on the animals, his pets. He has carried
his intercourse with them to a degree of perfection we rarely
attain with our human friends. There is no misunderstanding
between him and his dogs and birds; and how rich has been the
acquaintance in suggestion! Then the flowers! I liked to
hear him, for he recorded all their pretty ways,--not like a
botanist, but a lover. His interview with the Magnolia of Lake
Pontchartrain was most romantic. And what he said of the
Yuca seems to me so pretty, that I will write it down, though
somewhat more concisely than he told it:--

'"I had kept these plants of the Yuca Filamentosa six or seven
years, though they had never bloomed. I knew nothing of them,
and had no notion of what feelings they would excite. Last
June I found in bud the one which had the most favorable
exposure. A week or two after, another, which was more in the
shade, put out flower-buds, and I thought I should be able to
watch them, one after the other; but, no! the one which was
most favored waited for the other, and both flowered together
at the full of the moon. This struck me as very singular, but
as soon as I saw the flower by moonlight I understood it. This
flower is made for the moon, as the Heliotrope is for the sun,
and refuses other influences