I have had the skin peeled off the back of my neck with standing in the sun here, and my whole face and hands are burnt, by constant exposure, to as fine a coffee-color as you would wish to see of a summer's day. Yet, after all, I got as sharp a sunstroke on my shoulders, driving on a coach-box by the side of Loch Lomond once, as could be inflicted upon me by this American sky. The women here, who are careful, above all things, of their appearance, marvel extremely at my exposing myself to the horrors of tanning, freckling, etc.; but with hair and eyes as dark as mine, a [gipsy] complexion doesn't signify, and I prefer burning my skin to suffocating under silk handkerchiefs, sun-bonnets, and two or three gauze veils, and sitting, as the ladies here do, in the dark till the sun has declined. I am certainly more like a Red Indian squaw than when last you saw me; but that change doesn't signify, it's only skin deep....
You speak of the beauty of the Italian sky, and say that to pass the mornings with such pictures, and the evenings with such sunsets, is matter to be grateful for.
I have been spending a month with my friends, the Sedgwicks, in a beautiful hilly region in the State of Massachusetts; and I never looked abroad upon the woods and valleys and lakes and mountains without thinking how great a privilege it was to live in the midst of such beautiful things. I felt this the more strongly, perhaps, because the country in my own neighborhood here is by no means so varied and interesting.
I am glad you are to have the pleasure of meeting your own people abroad, and thus carrying your home with you: give my kindest love to them all whenever you see them....
I have not been hot this summer: the weather has been rainy and cold to a most uncommon degree; and I have rejoiced therefore, and so have the trees and the grass, which have contrived to look green to the end of the chapter, as with us....
If I am not allowed to go to the South this winter, it is just possible that I may spend three months in England.
Good-bye, my dearest H——.
I am ever yours,
F. A. B.
[This was the last letter I wrote to my friend from America this year; it was decided that I should not go to the South, and so lonely a winter as I should have had to spend in the country being rather a sad prospect, it was also decided that I should return to England, and remain during my temporary widowhood with my own family in London.