hed him accurately.

I have been an utterly free person for a month or two; and I do not
believe I ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed--and realized the
absence of the chains of slavery as I do this time. Usually my first
waking thought in the morning is, "I have nothing to do to-day, I belong
to nobody, I have ceased from being a slave." Of course the highest
pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor.
Therefore I labor. But I take my time about it. I work one hour or four
as happens to suit my mind, and quit when I please. And so these days
are days of entire enjoyment. I told Clark the other day, to jog along
comfortable and not get in a sweat. I said I believed you would not be
able to enjoy editing that library over there, where you have your
own legitimate work to do and be pestered to death by society besides;
therefore I thought if he got it ready for you against your return, that
that would be best and pleasantest.

You remember Governor Jewell, and the night he told about Russia, down
in the library. He was taken with a cold about three weeks ago, and I
stepped over one evening, proposing to beguile an idle hour for him
with a yarn or two, but was received at the door with whispers, and the
information that he was dying. His case had been dangerous during that
day only and he died that night, two hours after I left. His taking
off was a prodigious surprise, and his death has been most widely and
sincerely regretted. Win. E. Dodge, the father-in-law of one of Jewell's
daughters, dropped suddenly dead the day before Jewell died, but Jewell
died without knowing that. Jewell's widow went down to New York, to
Dodge's house, the day after Jewell's funeral, and was to return here
day before yesterday, and she did--in a coffin. She fell dead, of
heart disease, while her trunks were being packed for her return home.
Florence Strong, one of Jewell's daughters, who lives in Detroit,
started East on an urgent telegram, but missed a connection somewhere,
and did not arrive here in time to see her father alive. She was his
favorite child, and they had always been like lovers together. He always
sent her a box of fresh flowers once a week to the day of his death; a
custom which he never suspended even when he was in Russia. Mrs. Strong
had only just reached her Western home again when she was summoned to
Hartford to attend her mother's funeral.

I have had the impulse to write you several tim