I’ve been and I’ve got back, and I’m frozen solid, and am glad I’ve got back to my den.  G. and H. are now in the kitchen making biscuits.  Good-bye, chicken.  Mamma PRENTISS.

June 12th.—­Everybody is in bed save Darby and Joan.  We slept last night under four blankets and a silk comforter, which will give you a faint idea of the weather.  It has been beautiful to-day, and we have sat out of doors a good deal.  Papa and the boys went out to our hill after tea last evening and picked two quarts of strawberries, so as to have a short-cake to-day.  M. took me yesterday to see a nest in the orchard which was full of birds parted into fours—­not a crack between, and one of them so crowded that it filled about no space at all.  The hymn says, “Birds in their little nests agree,” and I should think they would, for they have no room to disagree in.  They all four stared at us with awful, almost embarrassing solemnity, and each had a little yellow moustache.  I had no idea they lived packed in so—­no wonder they looked melancholy.  The sight of them, especially of the one who had no room at all, made me quite low-spirited.

Wednesday.—­Your letter reached us on Monday, and we all went out and sat in a row on the upper step, like birds on a telegraph wire, and papa read it aloud.  I am lying by to-day—­writing, reading, lounging, and enjoying the scenery.  You ought to see papa eat strawberries!!!  They are very plentiful on our hill.  The grass on the lawn is pricking up like needles; easy to see if you kneel down and stare hard, but absolutely invisible otherwise; yet papa keeps calling me to look out of the window and admire it, and shouts to people driving by to do the same.  He has just come in, and I told him what I was saying about him, on which he gave me a good beating, doubled up his fist at me, and then kissed me to make up.... Don’t sew Isn’t it enough that I have nearly killed myself with doing it?  We have just heard of the death of Dickens and the sensation it is making in England.

Thursday.—­This bird of ours is splendid.  I have just framed the two best likenesses of you and hung them up in front of my table.  You would laugh at papa’s ways about coffee.  He complains that he drank too much at Philadelphia, and says that with strawberries we don’t need it, and that I may tell Maria so.  I tell her, and lo! the next morning there it is.  I ask the meaning, and she says he came down saying I did not feel very well and needed it!  The next day it appears again.  Why?  He had been down and ordered it because it was good.  The next day he orders it because it is his last day here but one, and to-morrow it will be on the table because it is the last!  Dreadful man! and yet I hate to have him go.