When you feel worried go off somewhere
and forget and throw it off. I should really rejoice to hear that you
and father and mother, with Professor and Mrs. Allen, Mrs. K., and a
few others of the same calibre would agree to meet together for
dancing cotillons. It would do you all good, and if you took Mr. K.'s
wife and poor Miss Much-Afraid, her daughter, into the alliance it
would do them good. Bless me! what a profane set everybody would think
you were, and yet you are the people of all the world most solemnly in
need of it. I wish you could be with me in Brattleboro' and coast down
hill on a sled, go sliding and snowballing by moonlight! I would
snowball every bit of the _hypo_ out of you! Now, my dear, if you
are going to get sick, I am going to come home. There is no use in my
trying to get well if you, in the mean time, are going to run yourself
down."
[Illustration: Ding, dong! Dead and gone!]
_January_, 1847.
MY DEAR SOUL,--I received your most melancholy effusion, and I am
sorry to find it's just so. I entirely agree and sympathize. Why
didn't you engage the two tombstones--one for you and one for me?
I shall have to copy for your edification a "poem on tombstones" which
Kate put at Christmas into the stocking of one of our most
hypochondriac gentlemen, who had pished and pshawed at his wife and us
for trying to get up a little fun. This poem was fronted with the
above vignette and embellished with sundry similar ones, and tied with
a long black ribbon.
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