Happily the time was near for a second flight to Florida, and she
wrote with her own rested hand en route from Charleston:--
"Room fragrant with violets, banked up in hyacinths, flowers
everywhere, windows open, birds singing."
She enclosed some fans, upon which she had been painting flowers
busily during the journey in order to send them back to Boston to be
sold at a fair in behalf of the Cretans: "Make them do the Cretes all
the good you can," she said.
It appears that by this time "Oldtown Folks" was fairly off her hands,
and she was free once more. She evidently found Mandarin very much to
her mind, and wrote contentedly therefrom, save for a vision of having
to go to Canada in the early spring to obtain the copyright of her
story.
The visits to Florida had now become necessary to her health. She saw
the next step to take was to surrender her large house in Hartford and
pass her winters altogether at the South. She wrote from Florida: "I
am leaving the land of flowers on the 1st of June with tears in my
eyes, but having a house in Hartford, it must be lived in. I wish you
and ---- would just come to see it. You have no idea what a lovely
place it has grown to be, and I am trying to sell it as hard as a
snake to crawl out of his skin. Thus on, till reason is pushed out of
life. There's no earthly sense in having anything,--lordy massy, no!
By the bye, I must delay sending you the ghost in the Captain Brown
house till I can go to Natick and make a personal inspection of the
premises and give it to you hot.
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