University of Virginia Library

“My Dear Jemima:—I should be very ungrateful
for all your kindness if I forgot to write you, as
I promised I would, and to tell you all about my
country home, which I am so glad to welcome
again.

“Well, what shall I say? You know how much
I love my mother, and how much the old village of
Newtown, about which I have talked so often, and
very tiresomely, I dare say. The town I find just
as it was, but there are people gone whom I used to
see, and loved to see. Poor uncle Truman! that
he should not march down to the old house to welcome
me with his kind kiss seems very, very strange.
And the house where he lived is closed and dismal.
I have been tempted to step in and train the sweet
briars, as I did before; but now I must not; and
they say, besides, that it is to pass into strange
hands.

“There are others besides who are gone away,
since I was last here; some to the city and some to
California—so far off! But why do you care to
know this, or anything, indeed, of our little, quiet
place, so unlike as it is to your noisy and splendid
streets?

“I do believe I was awake all of my first night

here, for the joy of my return; and the second, it
was the same thing, because the house and the
street were so quiet; and now, dear Jemima, it
is the thought of your kindness, and that of those
about you, which comes to my memory, and keeps
me very wakeful.

“But I have forgotten, after all, the greatest
piece of news, which is that we are not to be rich,
or to have any part of my uncle Bodgers' estate;
and my mother has just now told me, in greater
grief than I wish she felt, that our little annuity
which came to her from my kind old uncle is now to
be cut off.

“And who do you think is to inherit my uncle's
estate? Prepare for a grand surprise; it is Mr.
Adolphus Quid; who (is it not very queer?),
mamma says, is the heir at law; and stranger still,
he has offered to us a life-lease of the old Bodgers
house! So, I shall, perhaps, train the rose-briars
again.

“I know not what to make of it all. I know
only that my poor mother is very sad; says we
shall be very poor; I am sorry for that: but thanks
to what I have learned with you, I can do something.
I have planned it all. In a moment it
flashed into my head.

“I will have a little school in a corner of the old

Bodgers' mansion; there are plenty of scholars I
can find; and I will dress the school-room with
flowers, and will be so independent; and if you will
come and see us then, I will show you such a rosycheeked
little company as will make your heart
ache; and we will have such nice walks together
in the maple-grove; and you and I will cheer
mamma, and she shall forget that there has been
any change!

“Yet, is it not all very queer? And Mr. Quid,
too, who showed me kind attentions (were they not
kind?) the last winter! I don't know how I ought
to feel in accepting such charity as this. But my
mother's wish must be law with me in such a
matter.

“I half accuse myself now for having given such
answer to our old friend, Mr. Blimmer, of the everlasting
Blimmersville houses (pray, is the Blimmersville
church built yet?”)

[Oh! Kitty, Kitty!]

“For he is rich, they say, and might have given
a helping hand to us all, had I been Mrs. —!
But, trifling apart, have I not done well, Jemima,
in listening to my own heart, when it said roundly,
no! instead of listening to any jingle of money? I
am sure I did.

“Our own old home, if the change is made of
which I have told you, must be sold. This I do not
like. It will be hard to see it in other hands; it
will be hard to give up the walks we have trimmed,
and the flowers we have planted so many, many
years! And to think, besides, that we must accept
the charity of a stranger, in gaining only the shelter
of that kind uncle's roof, who, I am sure, would
have done everything to cheer us and to sustain us
in our own old home!

“He never thought it would be so; I am certain
he never did. We women know nothing of law,
to be sure; but are not our hearts judges of what
is just, as well as man's? And are not ties of kindred,
and friendship, and love, stronger than —
but shame on me! I have forgotten all my brave
thought of the school, where the flowers shall hang
each morning, with the dew fresh upon them; and
where you, Jemima, shall come as my lady patroness:
Pensez-y!

“Mr. Blimmer (I tremble in naming him!) has
been to Newtown: what can it be for? Certainly
not for me. They say—you know what gossips
country people are—that his visit was to a certain
Miss Bivins, daughter of our “eminent” lawyer;
certain it is that he called twice on her father, the
Squire:” and, furthermore, he sat in his pew on

Sunday, and Miss Mehitable wore a very conscious
air. Who knows? I fear I must give him up.
Ah! lack-a-day!”

Just so the honest heart of girlhood makes sunbeams
for itself, which centre within, and radiate
all around. It seeks no morbid food to live upon,
whether of romance or of crazed hopes; but trusting
in Heaven's goodness, and seeing with chastened
eye the beauty of honest endeavor, it finds its own
joys in the glow of a willing spirit, and in the gush
of an open heart.

And now, to complete my triplet, I lay before
my courteous reader another letter, being of city
origin, from the hand of no less diverting a writer
than my cousin, Miss Wilhelmina. I do not say
that it is absolutely genuine; but I do say that the
facts therein set forth are many of them to be relied
upon, and that it offers an every way ingenuous
picture of my pleasant cousin's thought and chitchat

She addresses an acquaintance made last summer
at Saratoga: