ental meaning into his eyes, and Benjy still
sitting watching me, I was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and
took him to see his mother's grave. At the bottom of the long walk is our
dog's cemetery:--no tombstones, but mounds; and a dog-rose grows there and
flourishes as nowhere else. It was my fancy as a child to have it planted:
and I declare to you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if it
_knew_ that it had relations of a higher species under its keeping. Benjy,
too, has a profound air of knowing, and never scratches for bones there,
as he does in other places. What horror, were I to find him digging up his
mother's skeleton! Would my esteem for him survive?

When we got there to-day, he deprecated my choice of locality, asking
what I had brought him _there_ for. I pointed out to him the precise
mound which covered the object of his earliest affections, and gathered
you these buds. Are they not a deep color for wild ones?--if their blush
remains a fixed state till the post brings them to you.

Through what flower would you best like to be passed back, as regards
your material atoms, into the spiritualized side of nature, when we
have done with ourselves in this life? No single flower quite covers all
my wants and aspirations. You and I would put our heads together
underground and evolve a new flower--"carnation, lily, lily, rose"--and
send it up one fine morning for scientists to dispute over and give
diabolical learned names to. What an end to our cozy floral
collaboration that would be!

Here endeth the epistle: the elect salutes you. This week, if the
authorities permit, I shall be paying you a flying visit, with wings
full of eyes,--_and_, I hope, healing; for I believe you are seedy, and
that _that_ is what is behind it. You notice I have not complained.
Dearest, how could I! My happiness reaches to the clouds--that is, to
where things are not quite clear at present. I love you no more than I
ought: yet far more than I can name. Good-night and good-morning.--Your
star, since you call me so.

LETTER XVIII.

Dearest: Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over
some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to
tell you what I _do_ all day. Was that to avoid the too great length of my
telling you what I _think_? Yet you get more of me this way than that.
What I do is every day so much the same: while what I think is always
different. However,