I am up early. This is easy for me here, for kitchen, dining-room and back-parlor are warm before six o’clock, and all in the house are moving. So that I write a great deal, and write well, as I believe you will say when you read what I have written. The publishers’ praise me and--pay me. Twenty-five dollars came from Philadelphia yesterday. Every cent of this (for I can have no wants of my own here) I shall send to my dear father. If he has only a few bits of silver in his purse, and no business, twenty-five dollars will go quite a long way in purchasing comforts. I am thine, dearest,
Blessed Edith! Guess who said this to-day, after I had been reading aloud in the Westminster Review--“I don’t understand a word, hardly, about this constructive policy and conservative elements, or what sort of difference there is between them. It indeed, seems to me that they must mean really the same thing. Don’t it to you?”
“No, I suppose not; for you are like your uncle. He talks about these things a great deal, and about the political economists, too, as if they were something like gods--or very mischievous men, for I am sure, now I think about it, I can’t tell which it is--whether he approves them or not. At any rate, if they are wise and good men, I think he is as good as the best of them can be, I am sure”--with a long sigh, and listlessly drawing the point of her needle along the hem she was making--“there isn’t an hour, hardly, that I am not wondering at all he knows, and wishing that I were a hundredth part as wise.”
“I wouldn’t mind this, aunt. You are good and kind, and everybody loves you. Aunt! aunt! see! Ponto has upset your basket; he is eating your spools, isn’t he? What a naughty dog.”
Ponto took the reproof for so much coaxing, and came scrambling over me. Aunt half-sighed, half-laughed, and said--
“This is the way Ponto serves me, if I don’t see to him. And I never do see to him, or any thing else, when I am talking or trying to think closely, never; I am discouraged sometimes, especially when I think how different you and your uncle are; and Mother Hedelquiver would see to twenty things, as if they were but one--I would give all the world that I could do the same. Ponto, Ponto, be still, or I will box your ears!”