It is just as well that you advise me against trying my fortunes in your "literary metropolis." My father is set with all his scriptures against the idea. "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to eternal life"; and, having predestined me for a deaconess in his church, he is firmly convinced that the strait and narrow way for me does not lie in the direction of New York. However, I have already whispered to my confidential hole-in-the-ground that nothing but the extremity of old-maid desperation will ever induce me to accept the vocation of a deaconess. Thus do a man's children play hide and seek with the beam in his eye while he practises upon the mote in theirs! But if, some day when the heavens are doubtful between sun and rain, you espy a little ruffled rainbow, propelled by a goose-quill pen, coquetting northward with the retiring clouds, know that 'tis the spirit of Jessica Doane arched for another outing in your literary regions. Meanwhile you amaze me with the charge that "of literature the city has no sense, or indeed only contempt," and I await the promised explanation with interest. For my own part, I often wonder if there will remain any opportunities for literary intelligence to expand at all when the happy (?) faculty of man's ingenuity has devastated all nature's countenance and resources with "improvements," cut down all the trees to make houses of, and turned all the green waterways into horse-power for machinery. Then we shall have cotton-mill epics, phonograph elegies from the tops of tall buildings; and then ragtime music, which interprets that divine art only for vulgar heels and toes, will take the place of anthems and great operas. The books have come, and among them is another lady's literary effort to make a garden. _Judith_ it is this time, following hard upon the sunburned heels of _Elizabeth, Evelina_, and I do not know how many more hairpin gardeners. Why does not some man with a real spade and hoe give his experience in a sure-enough garden? I am wearied of these little freckled-beauty diggers who use the same vocabulary to describe roses and lilies that they do in discussing evening toilets and millinery creations. VI JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: We have had a visitor, Professor M----, the doctor of English literature in E---- College, which you will remember is not very far from Morningtown. He came to examine a few first editions father has of some old English classics--(I have neglected to tell you that this is father's one carnal indulgence, dead books printed in funny hunchbacked type!). He is a young man, but so bewhiskered that his face suggests a hermit intelligence staring at life through his own wilderness. His voice is pitched to a Browning tenor tone, and I have good reasons for believing that he is a bachelor.