MITCHELL'S LETTERS--WOMAN SUFFRAGE--MEMBERSHIP IN VARIOUS
SOCIETIES--PUBLISHED ARTICLES--DEATH--CONCLUSION

Miss Mitchell was a voluminous letter writer and an excellent
correspondent, but her letters are not essays, and not at all in the
approved style of the "Complete Letter Writer." If she had any
particular thing to communicate, she rushed into the subject in the
first line. In writing to her own family and intimate friends, she
rarely signed her full name; sometimes she left it out altogether, but
ordinarily "M.M." was appended abruptly when she had expressed all that
she had to say. She wrote as she talked, with directness and promptness.
No one, in watching her while she was writing a letter, ever saw her
pause to think what she should say next or how she should express the
thought. When she came to that point, the "M.M." was instantly added.
She had no secretiveness, and in looking over her letters it has been
almost impossible to find one which did not contain too much that was
personal, either about herself or others, to make it proper; especially
as she herself would be very unwilling to make the affairs of others
public.

"Oct. 22, 1860. I have spent $100 on dress this year. I have a very
pretty new felt bonnet of the fashionable shape, trimmed with velvet; it
cost only $7, which, of course, was pitifully cheap for Broadway. If
thou thinks after $100 it wouldn't be extravagant for me to have a
waterproof cloak and a linsey-woolsey morning dress, please to send me
patterns of the latter material and a description of waterproofs of
various prices. They are so ugly, and I am so ditto, that I feel if a
few dollars, more or less, would make me look better, even in a storm, I
must not mind it."

"My orthodoxy is settled beyond dispute, I trust, by the following
circumstance: The editor of a New York magazine has written to me to
furnish an article for the Christmas number on 'The Star in the East.' I
have ventured, in my note of declination, to mention that if I
investigated that subject I might decide that there was no star in the
case, and then what would become of me, and _where should I go_? Since
that he has not written, so I may have hung myself!

"1879. April 25. I have 'done' New York very much as we did it thirty
years ago. On Saturday I went to Miss Booth's reception, and it was like
Miss Lynch's, only larger than Miss Lynch's was when I was there....
Miss Booth and a friend live on Fifty-ninth st