CAN you inform me why it was necessary for every man, woman and child whom I have met to-day, to remind me that it was hot? Why had all these people the right to assume that I did not know it was hot?

I am serious on this subject. I have been used this way before. I am continually informed by somebody that it is hot, or it is cold, or it rains, or it snows. To be informed once in the course of twenty-four hours that it is hot, is bad enough of itself; but to be apprised of that fact by every person you meet, is an improper interference with the funeral.

Now, for the benefit of the public at large, which is so eager to inform me that it is hot, I want to announce that I know it is hot. My knowledge on that score is positive, large and satisfactory. I am prepared, if necessary, to make a statement in writing that it is hot; to get me to a notary and make affidavit that it is hot.

Do I not know that it is hot, sitting here, with a vista of brick walls on every side, from which the sun glares at me; fanned through the open window by zephyrs, which bear on their wings nothing less cooling than coal smoke and caloric; with the hot whirling of machinery on one side and the rumble of the dusty, sweltering street on the other? Through an open space in the walls, I can see a patch of sky as large as a lady's pocket-handkerchief, across which bits of cloud go with thoughts of rain in them; and with the infinite longing with which poor Marie Stuart watched the clouds which were floating across from her prison to France, and as she, prisoned in Fotheringay, sent her thoughts and wishes by those cloudy messengers, with that kind of longing, I think of distant fields and woods, of cooling waters and leafy shades to which they are hastening, and so I send messages to the trees, and the rocks, and the flowers, and to the least living thing that "praises God by rubbing its legs together," as Thackeray so finely puts it.

On such a day as this, it would be supreme delight to eat lotus in the woods; to lie, stretched prone upon the grass, in the grateful shade, with no heavier task than to watch a sluggish beetle, or an ant carrying its burden, in imminent danger of collision with every tiny stalk; to listen to all the sounds in nature's orchestra, the stringed instruments of the insects floating in the air, and the reeds of the insects crawling in the grass, the flutes of the birds, the horns of the wind blowing through the tree-tops, and all those sweet, indefinable sounds you only hear when your ear is close to the ground, but which play their part in the grand symphony; to lie upon the grass, with not a sound from the great world jarring upon your Arcadia; to dream of Satyrs, and Fauns, and wood-nymphs, and water-nymphs, and the great god Pan, piping upon his pastoral reeds; to think of absent friends who are thinking of you, and will return, and of absent friends who are thinking of you, but will never return, as no road leads back from that country whither they have journeyed, and the daisies tell no stories, nor even the rustle of the grass which grows above them; to remember a chord of music long forgotten, and let its subtle melancholy weave a vision in the Past, when the chord was a sound and not a sigh, and the vision was a reality and not a shadow.

And to let the little bugs crawl in your ear and shiver the whole beautiful Dream-Fabric.

June 13, 1868.