MY DEAR AUNT LIZZIE,--I like to get your letters, as they tell about everything which everybody does not do. What a pleasant time I did have with aunt Ebie Hawthorne last summer! It was last summer; and all the lovely flowers were nodding, and the sun shone with all its might, and we each took a basket and a book and stayed all the afternoon. We brought home heaps of flowers and greens. I never had such a pleasant time here in the woods. In England my nurse Fanny and I used to take long walks on Sunday through the lanes, or into the parks; and take baskets and pick baskets full of daisies, pink-and-white. Then we went into the endless lanes, long, without a single sign of house or cottage (until we came to walk so far as to come to a little village). Nobody came along in rattling gigs or carriages; on Sunday you would not meet a person. With great ditches on each side, filled with tall grass as high as yourself, if you chose to get down into it. But I used to jump across, to get wild hawthorn and rose and honeysuckle and wall-flowers, and make great bunches of them. And then the buttercups and daisies and violets in the green grass! For in the lanes there was not a sign of earth,--all high, green grass. The sun shining so hot that you could go in your house-dress but for the properness of it. But I cannot explain and you cannot imagine; you must go to the place and look for yourself, and then you will know all about it. The parks are not level at all, but are nothing but high hills all together,--dear!--so lovely to run down and roll over on, and skip rope and jump! My father began to express his wishes in regard to provision for our aunt in case of his death; to burn old letters; and to impart to my mother and Una all that he particularly desired to say to them, among other things his dislike of biographies, and that he forbade any such matter in connection with himself in any distance of the future. This command, respected for a number of years, has been, like all such forcible and prophetic demurs, most signally set aside. It would take long to explain my own modifications of opinion from arguments of fierce resistance to the request for a biographical handling of him; and it matters, no doubt, very little. Such a man must be thoroughly known, as great saints are always sooner or later known, though endeavoring to hide their victories of holiness and charity. Certainly my father did not like to die, though he now wished to do so. My mother, later, often spoke, in consolation for us and for herself, of his dread of helpless old age; and she tried to be glad that his desire to disappear before decrepitude had been fulfilled. But such wise wishes are not carried out as we might choose. The sudden transformation which took place in my father after his coming to America was like an instant's change in the atmosphere from sunshine to dusky cold. I have never had the least difficulty in explaining it to myself.