a bunch of violets for Mrs. Child's birthday.
Incidentally, the lady mentioned Mrs. Child; she may have ordered the
flowers sent to her house. When the lady came to pay for them, the
florist said, "I cannot take pay for flowers intended for her. She is
a stranger to me, but she has given my wife and children so many
flowers in her writings, that I will never take money of her." Another
pretty incident is this: an unknown friend or admirer always sent Mrs.
Child the earliest wild flowers of spring and the latest in autumn.

I have said that one of her passions was music, which happily she now
has opportunities to gratify. "As for amusements," she says, "music is
the only thing that excites me.... I have a chronic insanity with
regard to music. It is the only Pegasus which now carries me far up
into the blue. Thank God for this blessing of mine." I should be glad
if I had room for her account of an evening under the weird spell of
Ole Bull. Her moral sense was keener than her aesthetic, but her
aesthetic sense was for keener than that of the average mortal.
Sometimes she felt, as Paul would have said, "in a strait betwixt
two"; in 1847 she writes Mr. Francis G. Shaw: "I am now wholly in the
dispensation of art, and therefore theologians and reformers jar upon
me." Reformer as she was and will be remembered, she was easily drawn
into the dispensation of art; and nature was always with her, so much
so that Col. Higginson says, "She always seemed to be talking
radicalism in a greenhouse."

Mr. and Mrs. Child retired from the _Standard_ in 1849. Her next
letters are dated from Newton, Mass. Her father was living upon a
small place--a house and garden--in the neighboring town of Wayland,
beautifully situated, facing Sudbury Hill, with the broad expanse of
the river meadows between. Thither Mrs. Child went to take care of him
from 1852 to 1856, when he died, leaving the charming little home to
her. There are many traditions of her mode of life in Wayland, but her
own account is the best: "In 1852, we made our humble home in Wayland,
Mass., where we spent twenty-two pleasant years, entirely alone,
without any domestic, mutually serving each other and depending upon
each other for intellectual companionship." If the memory of Wayland
people is correct, Mr. Child was not with her much during the four
years that her father lived. Her father was old and feeble and Mr.
Child had not the serene patience of his wife. Life ran more eas