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she writes:
We have had heavenly weather, and we needed it; for our house was a cave of spider-webs, cockroaches, dirt, and all abominations, but less than a week has brought it into beautiful order.
It now begins to put on that quaint, lively, pretty air that so fascinates me. Our weather is, as I said, heavenly, neither hot nor cold; cool, calm, bright, serene, and so tranquillizing.
There is something indescribable about the best weather we have down here.
It does not debilitate me like the soft October air in Hartford.
During the following February, she writes in reply to an invitation to visit a Northern watering place later in the season:
I shall be most happy to come, and know of nothing to prevent.
I have, thank goodness, no serial story on hand for this summer, to hang like an Old Man of the Sea about my neck, and hope to enjoy a little season of being like other folks.
It is a most lovely day to-day, most unfallen Eden-like.
In a letter written later in the same season, March 28, 1875,
Mrs. Stowe gives us a pleasant glimpse at their preparations for the proper observance of Easter Sunday in the little Mandarin schoolhouse.
She says:
It was the week before Easter, and we had on our minds the dressing of the church.
There my two Gothic fireboards were to be turned into a pulpit for the occasion.
I went to Jacksonville and got a fiveinch moulding for a base, and then had one fireboard sawed in two, so that there was an arched panel for each end. Then came a rummage for something for a top, and to make a desk of, until it suddenly occurred to me that our old black walnut extension table had a set of leaves.
They were exactly the thing.
The whole
