One mornin’ I wuz a settin’ out on the veranda, and I see her as usual a settin’ out for that corner, Snow with her arms full of toys, and Genieve wheelin’ Boy in his cart, and the front of that full of Snow’s babies settin’ up stiff and straight, a starin’ back with their round, blank eyes at Boy’s pretty, laughin’ face. It wuz a lovely mornin’. The dew sparkled on the grass, and the walks of white shinin’ shells which had been washed clean by a brisk, short rain the night before, shone white and silvery through the fresh, green grass borderin’ ’em on each side. And the trees tosted out their shinin’ green branches, and the glossy-leaved shrubs shook out their sweet-scented flowers on the balmy air. The climbin’ roses bloomed out sweet and pink, the orange-trees gleamed with the round globes of gold, and anon clusters of posys amongst the shinin’ green leaves. It wuz a fair seen, a fair seen. And I sot enjoyin’ it to the full, and as is the depraved and curius nater of men and wimmen, a enjoyin’ it still more as I turned to it from the pages of a voluminous letter I had jest got and received from Philury. Yes, as I read of the snow piles, and the dirty slosh of snow and mud that the Jonesvillians had to wade through under gray skies and cotton umberells, I sot with a deeper gratitude and a happier frame to my mind under the clear blue skies of the balmy South land, amongst the beauties and summer fragrance of Belle Fanchon. There wuz another letter I hadn’t read yet a layin’ in my lap, and my joyful meditation and my comparisons that I had drawed, and drawed so fur, had took my mind from it. [Illustration: THE JONESVILLIANS. ] But anon, as I turned back from the sight of Maggie and Thomas Jefferson a ridin’ off through the sunshine towards the depot, I took up the other letter, and as I opened it I involuntarily uttered them words which have sounded out from my lips in so many crysisses of joy or pain. I sez: “Good land! good land!” The letter wuz from John Richard Allen, writ for him by a friend. It seems that he had seen in the village paper that we wuz in the South and where we wuz; and he lay sick and a dyin’, as they said, in a little hamlet not a dozen miles away. I read the letter, and then went imegiatly—for to think and to act is but a second or third nater to me—and waked up my pardner, who was stretched out on a bamboo couch on the other end of the piazza fast asleep, with the _World_ a layin’ outstretched and abject at his feet. And I then told him the startlin’ truth that his own relation on his own side lay sick unto death less than a dozen miles from us. Wall, that noble man riz right up as I would have had him rozen to meet the exigencies of the occasion. He sez, “The minute our children get back we will take the pony and drive over and see him.”