I hope the summer has left you tolerably well at least, your occasional postal cards have been a comfort. We have been having a most delightful time all to-gether. The chance of an advertisement brought us, family, horses, servants, and baby into this remote corner of Wales loc_jc.00130_large.jpg & set us down in the old house of a reduced country squire. It rained for a week after we came, but we lit fires & unpacked our three volumed novels and tried to pretend that we were enjoying it. Then fortunately it cleared up and we began driving & playing tennis, I went fishing with our vicar's son and soon the charm of the hills, the loc_jc.00131_large.jpg country lanes and the air made us very well contented with out lot. A good many of our neighbours (anyone within 12 miles is a neighbour) have called on us & have turned out to be very pleasant people, though their intellectual horizon is a little limited perhaps.
To think of us you must imagine a spur of a healthy mountain covered with fine old trees, a winding carriage drive loc_jc.00132_large.jpg through trees coming to an open space & finally ending under the eaves of a low, many-gabled old house. Behind there is an old garden with high walls in the form of a square which are covered with peach and cherry trees growing like vines over them.
I try to study in the mornings, the afternoons I give to shooting, fishing or tennis. Only I find that afternoons of that loc_jc.00133_large.jpg kind have a great tendency to swallow up the mornings. Mariechen1 and Frank Costelloe2 & I however have been reading one of Sophocles' plays to-gether. Just now the Costelloes are off in Scotland on visit.
We are just off to loc_jc.00134_large.jpg loc_jc.00135_large.jpg a tennis party at the vicar's, so good bye for the present. The paper you send Mary3 came to hand O.K. many thanks.
With much love Logan.When will "Autumn Boughs"4 be out?
loc_jc.00136_large.jpgCorrespondent:
Logan Pearsall Smith
(1865–1946) was an essayist and literary critic. He was the son of Robert
Pearsall Smith, a minister and writer who befriended Whitman, and he was the
brother of Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe, one of Whitman's most avid followers.
For more information on Logan, see Christina Davey, "Smith, Logan Pearsall (1865–1946)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).