I could not but feel, indeed, that the book had given great pleasure to those I might well wish to please. My old friend, Mr. Frederic Harrison, wrote to me:--"I have read it all through with great attention and delight, and have returned to it again and again.... I am quite sure that it is the most finished and artistic of all your books and one of the most subtle and graceful things in all our modern fiction." And Charles Eliot Norton's letter from Shady Hill, the letter of one who never praised perfunctorily or insincerely, made me glad: "It would be easier to write about the book to any one else but you.... You have added to the treasures of English imaginative literature, and no higher reward than this can any writer hope to gain." The well-known and much-loved editor of the _Century_, Richard Watson Gilder, "on this the last Sunday of the nineteenth century"--so he headed his letter--sat down to give a long hour of precious time to _Eleanor's_ distant author. How can you reconcile it to your conscience to write a book like _Eleanor_ that keeps a poor fellow reading it to a finish till after three in the morning? Not only that--but that keeps him sobbing and sighing "like a furnace," that charms him and makes him angry--that hurts and delights him, and will not let him go till all is done! Yes, there are some things I might quarrel with--but, ah, how much you give of Italy--of the English, of the American--three nations so well-beloved; and how much of things deeper than peoples or countries. Imagine me at our New England farm--with the younger part of the family--in my annual "retreat." Last year at this time I was here, with the thermometer a dozen degrees below zero; now it is milder, but cold, bleak, snowy. Yesterday we were fishing for pickerel through the ice at Hayes's Pond--in a wilderness where fox abound--and where bear and deer make rare appearances--all within a few miles of Lenox and Stockbridge. The farmer's family is at one end of the long farm-house--I am at the other. It is a great place to read--one reads here with a sort of lonely passion. You know the landscape--it is in _Eleanor_. Last night (or this morning) I wanted to talk with you about your book--or telegraph--but here I am calmly trying to thank you both for sending us the copy--and, too, for writing it.