meeting dear friends, that attracted me to Boston was the
exhibition of statuary.... I am ashamed to say how deeply I am charmed
with sculpture: ashamed because it seems like affectation in one who
has had such limited opportunity to become acquainted with the arts. I
have a little figure of a caryatid which acts upon my spirit like a
magician's spell.... Many a time this hard summer, I have laid down my
dish-cloth or broom and gone to refresh my spirit by gazing on it a
few minutes. It speaks to me. It says glorious things. In summer I
place flowers before it; and I have laid a garland of acorns and
amaranths at its feet. I do love every little bit of real sculpture."

Her other artistic passion was music, quite out of her reach at this
period; but happily, she loved birds and flowers, both of which a Beet
Sugar Farm in the Connecticut Valley made possible. A family of
swallows made their nest in her woodshed, husband and wife dividing
the labors of construction, nursing, and even of incubation, though
the male bird did not have the same skill and grace as the lady, in
placing his feet and wings. Mrs. Child gives a pretty account of this
incident in a letter to one of her little friends, and says, "It seems
as if I could watch them forever." Later, in one of her letters to
the Boston _Courier_, she gives a more complete account of the
episode. Her observations convinced her that birds have to be taught
to fly, as a child is taught to walk.

When birds and flowers went, she had the autumn foliage, and she
managed to say a new thing about it: it is "color taking its fond and
bright farewell of form--like the imagination giving a deeper, richer,
and warmer glow to old familiar truths before the winter of
rationalism comes and places trunk and branches in naked outline
against the cold, clear sky."

Whether she had been living hitherto in a "rent" we are not told, but
in a letter of February 8, 1841, she informs us that she is about to
move to a farm on which "is a sort of a shanty with two rooms and a
garret. We expect to whitewash it, build a new woodshed, and live
there next year. I shall keep no help, and there will be room for
David and me. I intend to half bury it in flowers."

There is nothing fascinating in sordid details, but Mrs. Child in the
midst of sordid details, is glorious. A month before this last letter,
her brother, Prof. Francis, had written her apparently wishing her
more congenial circumstances;