I have but a moment to answer your most kind letter, because I have been engaged with company, or rather interrupted by company, ever since I got up, but you will pardon me.  Nothing ever did me so much good as your visit.  My only comfort is the hope of your return in the spring.  Then I hope to be well enough to show Mr Hawthorne all the holes and corners my own self.  Tell him so.  I am already about to study the State Trials, and make myself perfect in all that can assist the romance.  It will be a labor of love to do for him the small and humble part of collecting facts and books, and making ready the palette for the great painter.

Talking of artists, one was here on Sunday who was going to Upton yesterday.  His object was to sketch every place mentioned in my book.  Many of the places (as those round Taplow) he had taken, and K——­ says he took this house and the stick and Fanchon and probably herself.  I was unluckily gone to take home the dear visitors who cheer me daily and whom I so wish you to see.

    God bless you all, dear friends.

    Ever most affectionately yours, M.R.M.

    Swallowfield, September 24, 1852

My Very Dear Mr. Fields:  I am beginning to get very fidgety about you, and thinking rather too often, not only of the breadth of the Atlantic, but of its dangers.  However I must hear soon, and I write now because I am expecting a fellow-townsman of yours, Mr. Thompson, an American artist, who expected to find you still in England, and who is welcomed, as I suppose all Boston would be ...  People do not love you the less, dear friend, for missing you.

I write to you this morning, because I have something to say and something to ask.  In the first place, I am better.  Mr. Harness, who, God bless him, left that Temple of Art, the Deepdene, and Mr. Hope’s delightful conversation, to come and take care of me, stayed at Swallowfield three weeks.  He found out a tidy lodging, which he has retained, and he promises to come back in November; at present he is again at the Deepdene.  Nothing could be so judicious as his way of going on; he came at two o’clock to my cottage and we drove out together; then he went to his lodgings to dinner, to give me three hours of perfect quiet; at eight he and the Russells met here to tea, and he read Shakespeare (there is no such reader in the world) till bedtime.  Under his treatment no wonder that I improved, but the low-fever is not far off; doing a little too much, I fell back even before his departure, and have been worse since.  However, on the whole, I am much better.

Now to my request.  You perhaps remember my speaking to you of a copy of my “Recollections,” which was in course of illustration in the winter.  Mr. Holloway, a great print-seller of Bedford Street, Covent Garden, has been engaged upon it ever since,