anches of the woods, which answer them
back with moans and sighs and wild shrieks that make you shiver at night
and hide yourself under the bed-clothes.

When I was a little girl, sisters, my heart rose and fell to music like
this till I suffered terribly, sometimes, without speaking a word to any
one--for these are feelings which one never does talk of--there is no
language that I ever learned which will express them. But I have never
heard any music that could reach my soul like that which God gives us in
the blossom season--the summer, the fall of late fruit--and the bleak,
hard winter, when the clash of ice against ice has a sound that no man
or woman can reach.

This is my idea of music, and that is scattered far and given to all men
alike. You can't gather it up and deal it out in great, thundering
gushes. It isn't to be got for five dollars a ticket. In fact, the best
and sweetest things we have are given to the poor and rich just
alike--free, gratis, for nothing.

LXXIII.

HUBBISHNESS.

Sisters:--The music I have just been writing about is not fashionable by
any manner of means. Boston, the great central hub of all creation,
can't bottle it up or engage it by the ton to astonish all creation
with. She must have the manufactured article, and has sent all over the
world to get it.

Every fiddler, flute-player, drummer, and curlecued horn-man in Europe
has been brought over here to thunder-out and roll-off billows of sound
for people to pay for and wonder at.

We have a Niagara of waters that astonishes the world. Now the people of
Boston are determined to give us, in a great, wild, conglomeration of
voices, a full Niagara of sound.

I am New England all over, from the top of my beehive-bonnet to the sole
of my gaiter, but--confidentially, among ourselves--don't you think
Boston takes a little too much on herself? That narrow-streeted,
up-hilly city isn't all six of the New England States by a long shot.

My opinion is that Boston is putting on airs, and I for one don't mean
to put up with it. I hate stuck-up people, and I despise stuck-up towns.

Of course it is my duty to see all things in behalf of the Society, and
to do my best to lay them before you. I cannot say that my ideas of
Boston have not toned down considerably since I came to New York. Still
New England is New England, and Boston is Boston, if she does now and
then make a tremendous old goose of herself, and sometimes threatens to