not know you! Spring after spring and snow upon snow, when, like an earth-born beast, I was living here in content, rowing, skating, talking with the birds, and you, not fifty miles away, had risen like a star and were gleaming there in that inaccessible heaven. That this should be so, that I must accept it, is terrible to me; but to hear the story of it is like a foretaste of death. It fascinates, it draws me, and yet it kills. That you should say "we" over and over again, when you talk of the music you have heard, the books you have read, is more than I can bear. But I would not have you cease. I must know all, all; and yet it tortures. [Sidenote: _Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume_] Frankly, I don't at all like the tone of your letter. I like it as little as I approve your fashion of treating me "before folks." You glower upon me; half as if I were daughter of the sun and you his priest, and half Circassian slave. I don't like it! I came here to these solitudes for rest and mental peace. My mind is lying fallow. Should it waken to any immediate fertility, I don't want to expend it on you, either in antiphonal sentiment or in staving off heroics. To speak brutally, I want it for the publisher and mine own after-glory. If this plain statement of the case doesn't blight the peach-blossoms of your fancy, I don't know what will. Write me about your life here, the life of the woods and lake. You know enough bird-lore never learned from books to write a thousand St. Francis sermons. Even the fish have told you secrets. I fancy they think you some strange, fresh-water whale not to be accounted for. Tell me about them; and drop this mawkish sentiment caught from books. [Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_]