There is something truly touching to those who knew her in that phrase "almost tired." Indeed, she was truly tired through and through, and these later letters from which I have made the foregoing extracts are all written by an amanuensis.
Happily the time was near for a second flight to Florida, and she wrote with her own rested hand en route from Charleston:—
"Room fragrant with violets, banked up in hyacinths, flowers everywhere, windows open, birds singing."
She enclosed some fans, upon which she had been painting flowers busily during the journey in order to send them back to Boston to be sold at a fair in behalf of the Cretans: "Make them do the Cretes all the good you can," she said.
It appears that by this time "Oldtown Folks" was fairly off her hands, and she was free once more. She evidently found Mandarin very much to her mind, and wrote contentedly therefrom, save for a vision of having to go to Canada in the early spring to obtain the copyright of her story.
The visits to Florida had now become necessary to her health. She saw the next step to take was to surrender her large house in Hartford and pass her winters altogether at the South. She wrote from Florida: "I am leaving the land of flowers on the 1st of June with tears in my eyes, but having a house in Hartford, it must be lived in. I wish you and —— would just come to see it. You have no idea what a lovely place it has grown to be, and I am trying to sell it as hard as a snake to crawl out of his skin. Thus on, till reason is pushed out of life. There's no earthly sense in having anything,—lordy massy, no! By the bye, I must delay sending you the ghost in the Captain Brown house till I can go to Natick and make a personal inspection of the premises and give it to you hot."
Her busy brain was again at work with new plans for future books and articles for magazines.
"Gladly would I fly to you on the wings of the wind," she says, "but I am a slave, a bound thrall to work, and I cannot work and play at the same time. After this year I hope to have a little rest, and above all things I won't be hampered with a serial to write…. We have sold out in Hartford."
All this routine of labor was to have a new form of interruption, which gave her intense joy. "I am doing just what you say," she wrote, "being first lady-in-waiting on his new majesty. He is very pretty, very gracious and good, and his little mamma and he are a pair…. I am getting to be an old fool of a grandma, and to think there is no bliss under heaven to compare with a baby." Later she wrote on the same subject: "You ought to see my baby. I have discovered a way to end the woman controversy. Let the women all say that they won't take care of the babies till the laws are altered. One week of this discipline would bring all the men on their marrow-bones. Only tell us what you want, they would say, and we will do it. Of course you may imagine me trailing after our little king,—first granny-in-waiting."
In the summer of 1869 there was a pleasant home at St. John's Wood, in London, which possessed peculiar attractions. Other houses were as comfortable to look at, other hedges were as green, other drawing rooms were gayer, but this was the home of George Eliot, and on Sunday afternoons the resort of those who desired the best that London had to give. Here it was that George Eliot told us of her admiration and deep regard, her affection, for Mrs. Stowe. Her reverence and love were expressed with such tremulous sincerity that the speaker won our hearts by her love for our friend. Many letters had already passed between Mrs. Stowe and herself, and she confided to us her amusement at a fancy Mrs. Stowe had taken that Casaubon, in "Middlemarch," was drawn from the character of Mr. Lewes. Mrs. Stowe took it so entirely for granted in her letters that it was impossible to dispossess her mind of the illusion. Evidently it was the source of much harmless household amusement at St. John's Wood. I find in Mrs. Stowe's letters some pleasant allusions to this correspondence. She writes: "We were all full of George Eliot when your note came, as I had received a beautiful letter from her in answer to one I wrote from Florida. She is a noble, true woman; and if anybody doesn't see it, so much the worse for them, and not her." In a note written about that time Mrs. Stowe says she is "coming to Boston, and will bring George Eliot's letters with her that we may read them together;" but that pleasant plan was only one of the imagination, and was never carried out.