DEAR MOLLY,--I thought M. E. D. made you m-a-d; but you shall have it hereafter, if it makes you "demnition" mad; no appreciation of my delicacy in leaving out the E,--which stands for error, egotism, eggnog, epsom-salts, and every erroneous entity extant. Yes, the E,--have it, with all its compounds. The fact is, I suppose, that when people retire up into the country, they grow monstrous avaricious, and exact everything that belongs to them; lay up their best clothes and go slip-shod. I'm preparing for that condition, mentally and bodily. You see I begin to slip already in language. Your mother is trying to persuade me to buy a dressing-gown. A dressing-gown! when I don't expect to dress at all. As if a beggar who never expects to dine were to buy a service of plate, or a starving man should have his picture taken, and give a hundred dollars for famine in effigy. I have ordered a suit of summer clothes, to be sure, because I feel very thin, and expect to feel very light some five weeks hence. I shall get some cigars by the same token, because all things with me are vanishing into smoke. And if thin clothes can't live, can't be distended, filled out, and look respectable, upon smoke, let 'em die, and be crushed before the moth. [190] Monday morning. These tantrums, dear Molly, were--what? cut up?-last night after preaching, and mortal tired I was too. I do not know how it is, but it seems to me that every sermon I take now, every poor, little, innocent sermon comes bouncing out in the pulpit like a Brobdingnag. To Rev. William Ware. SHEFFIELD, Aug. 22, 1847. DEAR FRIEND,--I don't like Commencements. I hate travelling. And just now I hate my pen so much that I can scarce muster patience to tell you so. I have been reading Prescott's "Peru." What a fine accomplishment there is about it! And yet there is something wanting to me in the moral nerve. History should teach men how to estimate characters. It should be a teacher of morals. And I think it should make us shudder at the names of Cortez and Pizarro. But Prescott's does not. He seems to have a kind of sympathy with these inhuman and perfidious adventurers, as if they were his heroes. It is too bad to talk of them as the soldiers of Christ. If it were said of the Devil, they would have better fitted the character. Monday morning. The shadows of the lilac fall upon my page, checkered with the slant rays of the morning light; there is a slope of green grass under the window; here is quiet all around; I wish you were here. My love to your wife and children. Yours as ever, ORVILLE DEWEY. [191]To the Same. SHEFFIELD, Sept. 30, 1847. MY DEAR FRIEND,--I should have answered your letter of the 6th before, but sermons have been in hand or the first and second Sundays of October in New York, and my hand is commonly too weary, when engaged in such tasks, to turn to anything else.