Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/208

 am right thankful both for the flowers and the goodwill.

Now adieu to this long chatty epistle, and a hearty à Dieu to my little friend. 

 LETTER X. &emsp; hearty thanks my dear little heart for your letter of the 15th of December: it is so inexpressibly dear to me to hear and see how things are at home, as well in the little as the great. If you only had not your usual winter complaint. Ah that winter! but I am glad nevertheless that you feel a little better in December than in November, and assure myself that in January you will be better still. And then comes the prospect of summer and the baths of Marstrand. Mamma writes that you were evidently stronger for your summer visit to Marstrand. And you will be yet stronger still after your next summer's visit. But your ideal—that farm-yard servant-girl, who took the bull by the horns, when will you come up to that?

My strength has increased considerably for some time, thanks to my excellent Dr. Osgood and his little nothing-powders and globules. And when I feel myself well my soul is cheerful and well, and then my mind is, full of thoughts which make me happy; then I am glad to be on the Pilgrims' soil; that soil which the Pilgrim-fathers as they are here called, first trod, first consecrated as the home of religious and civil liberty, and from winch little band the intellectual cultivation of this part of the world proceeds and has proceeded.

It was in the month of December, 1620, when the little ship, the “Mayflower,” anchored on the shore of Massachussets, with the first Pilgrims, one hundred in number. They