Why should I loiter feverishly in Broadway, stabbing the hissing hot air with the splendid gold-headed cane that was presented to me by the citizens of Waukegan, Illinois, as a slight testimonial of their esteem? Why broil in my rooms? You said to me, Mrs. Gloverson, when I took possession of these rooms, that no matter how warm it might be, a breeze had a way of blowing into them, and that they were, withal, quite countryfied; but I am bound to say, Mrs. Gloverson, that there was nothing about them that ever reminded me, in the remotest degree, of daisies or new-mown hay. Thus, with sarcasm, do I smash the deceptive Gloverson. Why stay in New York when I had a village green? I gave it up, the same as I would an intricate conundrum--and, in short, I am here. Do I miss the glare and crash of the imperial thoroughfare? The milkman, the fiery, untamed omnibus horses, the soda fountains, Central Park, and those things? Yes I do; and I can go on missing 'em for quite a spell, and enjoy it. The village from which I write to you is small. It does not contain over forty houses, all told; but they are milk-white, with the greenest of blinds, and for the most part are shaded with beautiful elms and willows. To the right of us is a mountain--to the left a lake. The village nestles between. Of course it does, I never read a novel in my life in which the villages didn't nestle. Villages invariably nestle. It is a kind of way they have. We are away from the cars. The iron-horse, as my little sister aptly remarks in her composition On Nature, is never heard to shriek in our midst; and on the whole I am glad of it. The villagers are kindly people. They are rather incoherent on the subject of the war, but not more so, perhaps, then are people elsewhere. One citizen, who used to sustain a good character, subscribed for the Weekly New York Herald a few months since, and went to studying the military maps in that well-known journal for the fireside. I need not inform you that his intellect now totters, and he has mortgaged his farm. In a literary point of view we are rather bloodthirsty. A pamphlet edition of the life of a cheerful being, who slaughtered his wife and child, and then finished himself, is having an extensive sale just now. We know little of Honore de Balzac, and perhaps care less for Victor Hugo. M. Claes's grand search for the Absolute doesn't thrill us in the least; and Jean Valjean, gloomily picking his way through the sewers of Paris, with the spooney young man of the name of Marius upon his back, awakens no interest in our breasts. I say Jean Valjean picked his way gloomily, and I repeat it. No man, under these circumstances, could have skipped gayly. But this literary business, as the gentleman who married his colored chambermaid aptly observed, "is simply a matter of taste."