Page:Letters to Various Persons.djvu/18

6 than upon the veins of those which are soon to be strewed around me. It is nothing but Indian Summer here at present. I mean that any weather seems reserved expressly for our late purposes, whenever we happen to be fulfilling them. I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.

What with the crickets, and the lowing of kine, and the crowing of cocks, our Concord life is sonorous enough. Sometimes I hear the cock bestir himself on his perch under my feet and crow shrilly long before dawn, and I think I might have been born any year for all the phenomena I know.

We count sixteen eggs daily now, when arithmetic will only fetch the hens up to thirteen; but the world is young, and we wait to see this eccentricity complete its period.

My verses on Friendship are already printed in the Dial, not expanded, but reduced to completeness, by leaving out the long lines, which always have, or should have, a longer, or at least another sense than short ones.

Just now I am in the mid-sea of verses, and they actually rustle round me, as the leaves would round the head of Autumnus himself, should he thrust it up through some vales which I know, but, alas! many of them are but crisped and yellow leaves like his, I fear, and will deserve no better fate than