"
Many were the pleasant descriptions of her home sent forth to tempt
her friends away from the busy North. "Here is where we read books,"
she said in one of her letters, written in the month of March. "Up
North nobody does,--they don't have time; so if ---- will mail his
book to Mandarin, I will 'read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.' We
are having a carnival of flowers. I hope you read my 'Palmetto
Leaves,' for then you will see all about us.... Our home is like a
martin-box.... I cannot tell you the quaint odd peace we have here in
living under the oak. 'Behold, she dwelleth under the oak at Mamre.'
All that we want is friends, to whom we may say that solitude is
sweet. We have some neighbors, however, who have made pretty places
near us. Mr. Stowe keeps up a German class of three young ladies, with
whom he is reading Faust for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time,
and in the evening I read aloud to a small party of the neighbors. We
have made up our home as we went along, throwing out a chamber here
and there, like twigs out of the old oak.... The orange blossoms have
come like showers of pearl, and the yellow jessamine like golden
fleeces, and the violets and the lilies, and azaleas. This is
glorious, budding, blossoming spring, and we have days when merely to
breathe and be is to be blessed. I love to have a day of mere
existence. Life itself is a pleasure when the sun shines warm, and the
lizards dart from all the shingles of the roof, and the birds sing in
so many notes and tones the yard reverberates; and I sit and dream and
am happy, and never want to go back North, nor do anything with the
toiling, snarling world again.
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