I have never seen so happy flowers in any other home. They lived with you so cheerfully and confidingly, and felt so sure of receiving from you sympathy and tenderness in all their sorrows.
How could they grow cold and colder and die without your knowing? They must have called you. Could any bedroom be so remote you could not hear? I am very sorry, Mrs. Carr, for you and them. Can your loss be repaired? Will not other flowers lose confidence in you and live like those of other people, sickly and mute, half in, half out of, the body?
No snow fell here Easter evening, but a few wet flakes are falling here and there to-day.
Thank you for sending the prophecy of that loving naturalist of yours. It is indeed a pleasant one, but my faith concerning its complete fulfillment is weak. I do not know who your other doctor is, but I am sure that when in the Yosemite Valley and following the Pacific coast I would obtain a great deal of geology from Dr. Carr, and from yourself and that I should win the secret of many a weed’s plain heart.
I am overestimated by your friend. He places me in company far too honorable, but if we meet in the fields of the sunny South I shall certainly speak to him.
Tell him, Mrs. Carr, in your next how thankful I am for his sympathy. He is one who can sympathize in full. I feel sorry for his like misfortune and am indebted to him through you for so many good and noble thoughts.
A little messenger met me with your letter of April 8th when I was on my way to the woods for the first time. I read it upon a moss-clad fallen tree. You only of my friends congratulated me on my happiness in having avoided the misery and mud of March, but for the serious part of your letter, the kind of life which our plant friends have, and their relation to us, I do not know what to think of it. I must write of this some other time.
In this first walk I found Erigenia, which here is ever first, and sweet little violets, and Sanguinaria, and Isopyrum too, and Thalictrum anemonoides were almost ready to venture their faces to the sky. The red maple was in full flower glory; the leaves below and the mosses were bright with its fallen scarlet blossoms. And the elm too was in flower and the earliest willows. All this when your fields had scarce the memory of a flower left in them.
I will not try to tell you how much I enjoyed in this walk after four weeks in bed. You can feel it.
Indianapolis, June 9th, 1867.