I sent up yesterday and got the Christmas _Leslies_. Why, I remembered that story, though I didn’t recognize the name. It was very sweet and tender. I can see that you like kids. I congratulate you heartily on your work; I hope you will find it profitable and a blessing. You have unquestioned sympathy and a deep and true “humanness.” You ought to come to New York, where you will be _in medias res_. There’s nothing like being on the ground. You get artistic ideas and associations here that would be invaluable to you. Writing is a bully game. You want to know the dealers. I studied that fact out, and came here. To-day I get five times more per word than when I came. Sister of the pen and stamped-envelope-for-return, I speak wisdom to you. And here is life. Beautiful are the mountains and the moon silvering their tops; but here one learns the value of each upon each. And the moonlight of the mind is the most beautiful. Here art teaches Nature to conform. You could expand and rise here. I do not advise you, but I speak with wisdom of the markets and the heart. Pardon me if I am scornful of the Mayonnaise, and am dubious about the nuts. I could overlook a stab at my heart with a poniard, but—the tomatter and I have been friends. Yet I could—may I try one the way you fix ’em? Wish I could have accepted your invitation to sail down on the big golden bubble of a moon, and drap under the cherry tree. Bet a dollar I’d have lit on the rake and the hoe you left there in the grass. Can’t you ever remember to put ’em behind the door in the woodhouse when you are scratching around in the garden? I haven’t ridden on the moon in a long time. It’s on the full now, and I’m afraid I’d slide off. When it gets to look like a slice of canteloupe again, so I can hold on to the ends, I’ll try to make that trip. Please spread an armful of hay and an old piece of carpet under the cherry tree so I won’t come down with such a jolt when I jump off. Then I’d say something like this: “Miss Howard, please excuse my intrusion into your section of real estate devoted to domestic agriculture; but the object of my somewhat precipitous descent is to ascertain the identity of a certain youthful and pulchritudinous being with whom at a considerably earlier period I sustained cognizance, and whose identification is relatively dependent upon a tonsorial arrangement in which her tresses retain the perpendicularity peculiar to juvenility at the time referred to.” And you would answer: