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.” As I said, they had gone to the depot to meet visitors from Delaware—a very distinguished cousin of Maggie’s on her own side, who had writ that he wuz a goin’ to pass through here on his way further South, and he would stop off a day or two with ’em—he and his little boy, if it wuz agreeable to them. I had hearn a sight about this rich Senator Coleman—Maggie’s father, old Squire Snow, wuz dretful proud of him. He had made himself mostly—or, that is, had finished himself off. He went to Delaware as a teacher, and married a Miss Fairfax, a very rich young woman down there, settled down in her home, went into business, got independent rich, wuz sent to Congress and Senate, and had a hand in makin’ all the laws of his State, so I hearn. He wuz now takin’ a tower through the Southern States with his motherless boy, little Raymond Fairfax Coleman, so he writ (he thought his eyes on him, and jest worshipped the memory of his wife). Maggie and Thomas J. had met him in Washington the winter before, and they sort o’ took to each other. And so he wuz a goin’ to stop off a few days with ’em.