It is the
place to forget the outside world, and live in one's self. And if you
were here, we would go together and gather azaleas, and white lilies,
and silver bells, and blue iris. These flowers keep me painting in a
sort of madness. I have just finished a picture of white lilies that
grow in the moist land by the watercourses. I am longing to begin on
blue iris. Artist, poet, as you are by nature, you ought to see all
these things, and if you would come here I would take you in heart and
house, and you should have a little room in our cottage. The history
of the cottage is this: I found a hut built close to a great live-oak
twenty-five feet in girth, and with overarching boughs eighty feet up
in the air, spreading like a firmament, and all swaying with mossy
festoons. We began to live here, and gradually we improved the hut by
lath, plaster, and paper. Then we threw out a wide veranda all round,
for in these regions the veranda is the living-room of the house. Ours
had to be built around the trunk of the tree, so that our cottage has
a peculiar and original air, and seems as if it were half tree, or a
something that had grown out of the tree. We added on parts, and have
thrown out gables and chambers, as a tree throws out new branches,
till our cottage is like nobody else's, and yet we settle into it with
real enjoyment. There are all sorts of queer little rooms in it, and
we are accommodating at this present a family of seventeen souls.
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