she had been at a concert with her a few days before, and that Margaret Fuller turned round and scolded them all for talking during the music; but that was right, I think. They call her here 'the great, the intellectual Miss Fuller.'
"I think these great people do not know how frightened girls are; they would not be so severe. My teacher, Mr. George B. Emerson, does not believe in her. I told him about my visit to her the next morning. He said: 'Learn to think, young lady, and the talk will come of itself.'
"Mr. Emerson impresses me more and more every day. I see that he reads all our characters, and that, severe as he is, he does not mean to make machines of us; he is a real chivalrous gentleman as well, and most respected in Boston.
"I have been suffering again with that pain in the chest, on going upstairs. O, I wish there were no such things as stairs or hills in this world; but I am coming home for the Christmas holidays next week and that will cure me. Good-night, dear Mother.
_____
"Dearest Mother, — I had a sad coming to Boston through the snow storm; the gentlemen inside the stage coach threw their shawls around me, and one took off his overshoes, and put them on my feet outside of my own thin boots.
"'This little girl will freeze to death,' said he.
"But I would not come inside, it makes me so deathly sea-sick as you know. I have been very ill, with sore throat, but got up my lessons all the same.
"It is a pretty hard ride from Keene to Nashua, outside the coach when it snows.
"Ever yours with love
"M. E."
Oh! the dreariness of those stage-coach rides in winter! It almost extinguishes the pleasure of the remembrance of how perfect they were in summer, under the green boughs and the straggling sunbeams. I think I laid the foundations of a life-long rheumatism in those dreadful drives during the New Hampshire winters.
