We have had three days of delicious rain--it all soaks into the sandy soil here and leaves no mud whatever. The little place is the most curious mixture of sadness with delight. The sadness of _things_--things every one of which was done either by our hands or by our planning, old furniture renovated, there isn't an object in the house that isn't associated with past life, old summers, dead people, people who will never come again, etc., and the way it catches you round the heart when you first come and open the house from its long winter sleep is most extraordinary. I have been reading Bourget's "Idylle Tragique," which he very kindly sent me, and since then have been reading in Tolstoy's "War and Peace," which I never read before, strange to say. I must say that T. rather kills B., for my mind. B.'s moral atmosphere is anyhow so foreign to me, a lewdness so obligatory that it hardly seems as if it were part of a moral _donnée_ at all; and then his overlabored descriptions, and excessive explanations. But with it all an earnestness and enthusiasm for getting it said as well as possible, a richness of epithet, and a warmth of heart that makes you like him, in spite of the unmanliness of all the things he writes about. I suppose there is a stratum in France to whom it is all manly and ideal, but he and I are, as Rosina says, a bad combination.... Tolstoy is immense! I am glad _you_ are in a writing vein again, to go still higher up the scale! I have abstained on principle from the "Atlantic" serial, wishing to get it all at once. I am not going abroad; I can't afford it. I have a chance to give $1500 worth of summer lectures here, which won't recur. I have a heavy year of work next year, and shall very likely _need_ to go the following summer, which will anyhow be after a more becoming interval than this, so, _somme toute_, it is postponed. If I went I should certainly enjoy seeing you at Rye more than in London, which I confess tempts me little now. I love to _see_ it, but staying there doesn't seem to agree with me, and only suggests constraint and money-spending, apart from seeing you. I wish you could see how comfortable our Cambridge house has got at last to be. Alice who is upstairs sewing whilst I write below by the lamp--a great wood fire hissing in the fireplace--sings out her thanks and love to you.... _To Benjamin Paul Blood._ CHATHAM, MASS., _June 28, 1896_.