considered, that what one man calls weeds another classifies among
the choicest flowers in the garden. But this reviewer is certainly
a man of sense, and sometimes tickles me under the fifth rib. I beg
you to observe, however, that I do not acknowledge his justice in
cutting and slashing among the characters of the two books at the
rate he does; sparing nobody, I think, except Pearl and Phoebe. Yet
I think he is right as to my tendency as respects individual
character.

"I am going to begin to enjoy the summer now, and to read foolish
novels, if I can get any, and smoke cigars, and think of nothing at
all; which is equivalent to thinking of all manner of things."

The composition of the "Tanglewood Tales" gave him pleasant employment,
and all his letters, during the period he was writing them, overflow
with evidences of his felicitous mood. He requests that Billings should
pay especial attention to the drawings, and is anxious that the porch of
Tanglewood should be "well supplied with shrubbery." He seemed greatly
pleased that Mary Russell Mitford had fallen in with his books and had
written to me about them. "Her sketches," he said, "long ago as I read
them, are as sweet in my memory as the scent of new hay." On the 18th of
August he writes:--

"You are going to publish another thousand of the Seven Gables. I
promised those Pyncheons a preface. What if you insert the
following?

"(The author is pained to learn that, in selecting a name for the
fictitious inhabitants of a castle in the air, he has wounded the
feelings of more than one respectable descendant of an old Pyncheon