well enough, shall try to begin on my Katy once more. But
since reading the Recit d'une Soeur, I am disgusted with myself and my
writings. I ache to have you read it. Miss Lyman and Miss Warner send
love to you. I do not like Miss L.'s hacking cough, and she says she
does not believe Miss W. will live through the winter. Among us we
contrive to keep up a vast amount of laughter; so we shall probably live
forever.

_August 18th._--I have enjoyed Miss Lyman wonderfully, but want to
get nearer to her. I see that she is one who does not find it easy to
express her deepest and most sacred feelings. I read Katy to her and
Miss W., as they were kind enough to propose I should, and they made
some valuable suggestions to which I shall attend if I ever get to
feeling able to begin to write again. I am as well as ever save in one
respect, and that is my sleep; I do not sleep as I did before I left
home, while I ought to sleep better, as I work several hours a day in
the woods, in fact do almost literally nothing else.... But after all,
we are having the nicest time in the world. I have not seen George so
like himself for many years; he lives out of doors, pulls down fences,
picks up brushwood, and keeps happy and well. I feel it a real mercy
that his thoughts are agreeably occupied this summer, as otherwise he
would be incessantly worried about Anna. We work together a good deal;
this morning I spoiled a new hatchet in cutting down milkweed where our
kitchen garden is to be and we are literally raising our Ebenezer, which
we mean to conceal with vines in due season. George is just as proud of
our woods as if he created every tree himself. The minute breakfast is
over the boys dart down to the house like arrows from the bow, and there
they are till dinner, after which there is another dart and it is as
much as I can do to get them to bed; I wonder they don't sleep down
there on the shavings. The fact is the whole Prentiss family has got
house on the brain. There, this old letter is done, and I am going to
bed, all black and blue where I have tumbled down, and as tired as tired
can be.

_Aug. 28th._--I made a fire in MY woods yesterday, and another to-day,
when I melted glue, and worked at my rustic basket, and felt extremely
happy and amiable.

_Sept. 13th._--Miss Warner told me to-night that she thought my Katy
story commonplace at the beginning, but that she changed her mind
afterward. Of course I wrote a story about that mar