more like talking German than
English. The Riverside Magazine has just come and completed my downfall,
as it has a syllable left out of one of my verses, as has been the case
with a hymn in the hymn-book at Cincinnati and one in the Association
Monthly. I am now fairly entitled to the reputation of being a jolty
rhymster. It has been a trifle cooler to-day and we are all refreshed by
the change.

_Friday._--Papa read me last evening a nice thing about Stepping
Heavenward from Dr. Robinson in Paris and a lady in Zurich, and I went
to bed and slept the sleep of the just--till daylight, when five hundred
flies began to flap into my ears, up my nose, take nips off my face and
hands, and drove me distracted. They woke papa, too, but he goes to
sleep between the pecks.

_August 4th._--Tuesday I went on a tramp with M. and brought home a
gigantic bracket. We met papa as we neared the house, and he had had his
first bath in his new tank at the mill, and was wild with joy, as were
also the boys. After dinner I made a picture frame of mosses, lichens,
and red and yellow toadstools, ever so pretty; then proofs came, then we
had tea, and then went and made calls. Yesterday on a tramp with M.,
who wanted mosses, then home with about a bushel of ground-pine. Every
minute of the afternoon I spent in trimming the grey room with the pine
and getting up my bracket, and now the room looks like a bower of bliss.
I was to go with M. on another tramp to-day, but it rains, and rain is
greatly needed. The heat in New York is said to exceed anything in the
memory of man, something absolutely appalling.

_Friday._--Here I am on the piazza with Miss K. by my side, reading the
Life of Faber. She got here last night in a beautiful moonlight, and as
I had not told her about the scenery, she was so enchanted with it on
opening her blinds this morning, that she burst into tears. I drove her
round Rupert and took her into Cheney's woods, and the boys invited us
down to their workshop; so we went, and I was astonished to find that
the bath-house is really a perfect affair, with two dressing-rooms and
everything as neat as a pink. Miss K. is charmed with everything, the
cornucopias, natural brackets, crosses, etc., and her delusion as to all
of us, whom she fancies saints and angels, is quite charming, only it
won't last.

_13th._--There is a good deal of sickness about the village. I made
wine-jelly for four different people yesterday, and the rest