With your usual sagacity you timed your letter _just_ to the moment. It was Christmas Eve, five o’clock, cold as Greenland. I had sent my assistants home the day before to enjoy a few days of leisure with their friends. I sat writing at the farthest end of my large room, from which only a range of white curtains separated and enclosed me in my little “counting-room.” The postman’s rap at the door caused me to look up, and through the curtains I could discern a singular glimmer of lights like stars, but moving from point to point, as if the firmament were not satisfied with the arrangement of its luminaries, and sought the opportunity to rearrange. Startled at first, I rose from my seat to rush out, but suddenly remembering the evening and the occasion it occurred to me that my presence at that especial instant might not be desirable and I reseated. After a minute more of shifting and fluttering, my little domestic Emily appeared between the curtains, “Here are two letters, and will you please to walk out.” The letters were from you and Fannie Atwater, and the walking out revealed a Christmas tree in full blaze all for myself. It had been arranged and left by my good ladies before they had departed, with instructions to the domestics to produce and light it at five o’clock in the evening. It abounded in fruit and flowers and mosses, and some little nice things which their good hearts had dictated for my comfort. And so, in the delicate shadows falling like tracery upon the snow which spread beneath its branches, I sat me down and read your dear, welcome letter. Although you did not intend a word of sentiment in it, nor a touching sentence, I could not truly say that my hand did not sometimes brush across my eyes as I read; it was so like old times to receive a whole letter from you, all from you, and all for me. I knew I did not deserve it. I have been so remiss in writing, and I don’t know how it happens. I can only account for it on your own grounds, that when we are occupied and feel that there is something to say there is no time to say it, and when unoccupied we become listless and there seems to be nothing to say. I am always disgusted at this state of things in the human economy, but I can neither reconstruct nor mend it. It is a little more than a week since I posted a long letter to Sally all about myself, selfish as could be, and I must not inflict a similar chapter on you, as you will be compelled to go over that when it arrives. I am rejoiced to hear from yourself that you are better than when I left.