Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/417

Rh been! I could scarcely collect my faculties, much less take pen quietly in hand, and even now I am writing on flying foot, like Mercury, if I may so say, ready to be carried off at a moment's warning, or by kind friends. Nevertheless, I must give you shortly, and in great haste, a little account of my proceedings.

From Saratoga we went to Lennox, in Massachusetts, where, according to arrangement, I met my excellent friends the O.'s, from Boston. I here also parted with my agreeable travelling companion, Mrs. S., and her husband, who had kindly met us by the way.

The country around Lennox is romantically lovely, varied with wood-covered hills, and the prettiest little lakes. Amid this scenery have Catherine Sedgewick and Nathaniel Hawthorne their rural homes. I had been invited to both, and I wished to see both. I spent four and twenty hours with the excellent and amiable Catherine Sedgewick and her family, enjoying her company and that of several agreeable ladies. There were no gentlemen; gentlemen, indeed, seemed to be rare in social circles of this neighbourhood. But they were less missed here than is generally the case in society, because the women of this little circle are possessed of unusual intellectual cultivation; several of them endowed with genius and talents of a high order. Fanny Kemble has her home here when she resides in America; at the present time she is in England. The scenery is beautiful; these ladies enjoy it and each other's society, and life lacks nothing with the greater number.

I am, in a general way, struck with the excess of ladies, and the scarcity of gentlemen in the homes of the lesser cities of the Eastern States. The gentlemen are attracted to the larger cities, or to the great West, to carry on business, to construct railways, or to acquire wealth in one way or another. Many solitary ladies are met with in these Eastern States, who are neither wanting in