ica, or the Zuni corn dance,--if there is such
a thing,--or any alkaline plains, or pueblos, or
buttes, or buffalo wallows; we only want to see
you, individually and collectively, and the High
Valley. May we come and stay a fortnight? Deniston
thinks he shall be gone at least as long as that.
We expect to leave Boston on the 31st of July. You
will know what time we ought to get to St.
Helen's,--I don't, and I don't care, so only we
get there and find you at the station. Oh, my dear
Clovy, isn't it fun?

I have seen several of our old school-set lately,
Esther Dearborn for one. She is Mrs. Joseph P.
Allen now, as you know, and has come to live at
Chestnut Hill, quite close by. I had never seen
her since her marriage, nearly five years since,
till the other day, when she asked me out to
lunch, and introduced me to Mr. Joseph P., who
seems a very nice man, and also--now don't faint
utterly, but you will! to their seven children! He
had two of his own when they married, and they
have had two pairs of twins since, and "a
singleton," as they say in whist. Such a houseful
you never did see; but the twins are lovely, and
Esther looks very fat and happy and well-to-do,
and says she doesn't mind it a bit, and sees more
clearly every day that the thing she was born for
was to take the charge of a large family. Her
Joseph P. is very well off, too. I should judge
that they "could have cranberry sauce every day
and never feel the difference," which an old
cousin of my mother's, whom I dimly remember as a
part of my childhood, used to regard as
representing the high-water mark of wealth.

Mary Strothers has been in town lately, too. She
has only one child, a little girl, which seems
miserably few compared with Esther, but on the
other hand she has never been without neuralgia in
the face for one moment since she went to live in
the Hoosac Tunnel, she told me, so there are
compensations. She seems happy for all that, poor
dear Mary. Ellen Gray never has married at all,
you know. She goes into good works instead, girl