you have my best wishes for your future happiness.

"Your loving cousin,

"MARGUERITE."

_June 29_.

A visit yesterday from our friend Mrs. Sarah L. Hopper, the clever
contributor to several Southern journals. Among them the _Washington
Gazette_, and the _True Woman_--the latter an anti-suffrage journal.
Mrs. Hopper not only writes well; she is also a woman of varied and
excellent reading, and the appreciation of the modern classics is
displayed in one of her poems--an admirable apostrophe to the character
and works of Dante. This poem, which was published some time since,
Mrs. Hopper once recited to us, and both mamma and I were struck with
the true ring of poesy so apparent in it.

_June 30_.

Upon returning from church yesterday, we found the front door standing
open, a couple of arm-chairs upon the piazza, and a newspaper or two in
lieu of the occupants--proof unmistakable of a masculine invasion. Who
it was we could not imagine; that it was not a neighbor we were
convinced by seeing the morning _Herald_ and _Times_, for the Sunday
papers cannot be obtained here, save by being at the depot when the
interminable way-train comes up from New York, and waylaying the
newsboy who accompanies the cars; and for this our neighbors are rarely
sufficiently enterprising. Unmistakably our visitors had come from the
city.

Upon questioning Minna, she gave us a graphic description of the
gentlemen. One was "tall, oh so tall! with dark hair and red
cheeks"--in him we recognized Mr. Walworth Ward--the other was a blonde
gentleman whom she had seen here before.

"Lina has already made wine _padding_," she said, seeing Ida about to
descend and inspect the larder. "Miss no fret--all right."

Ida and I then started to walk to the grove, where we thought we would
probably find our guests awaiting our return. Not there, indeed, but
in the vegetable garden we found them, where they were kindly looking
after the interests of the family by weeding the strawberry-beds,
regardless of the Sabbath, and notwithstanding one of the gentlemen was
a grandson of a D.D. In answer to our regrets that we should have been
absent when they arrived, they mildly intimated some surprise, one
having telegraphed his proposed coming, and the other sent a message
through papa the day previous; dear papa, however, had as usual
forgotten to deliver the message, and whither the telegram went, no one
could imagine.

_July 1_.

A visit ye