From Julie to Morris; Julie was at Red Cottage in Brockport, NY, Morris was in New Orleans; taken from a letter that was some forty handwritten pages long (surely some sort of record) though some pages have gone missing.

“It is a very cold evening, no soft southern breezes fan our cheeks with perfumed breath, no flower odors greet us, no rich green leaves wave and whisper and nestle; but the fierce wind rages and roars and sweeps along with majest. It is very cold. Courageous is the soul that ventures abroad this day. I shall sit by my ain fireside, that is to say my own stove (what a miserable substitution as far as poetry is concerned) and sew, ‘stitch-stitch-stitch-gusset and band and seam’.

Lottie is in her waggon playing with divers and sundry odds and ends such as half an apple core, a bit of shingle, a tin cup and such like. They are just as pleasant to her as if they were worth solid gold. She is in a very conversable humor and says constantly, ‘Ajax-see there!’  These two words being her stock and trade in the conversation line.  Where she made the acquaintance of the said Ajax it is impossible for me to determine. I suspect however he must have been an adorer of her’s in some former life away back in olden times when the world was young. Perhaps she helped him ‘some rocks vast weight to throw’. Perhaps she walked and talked in the sweet moonlight with Clytemnestra, before she did the fatal deed which wrote her murderess. I often think there is a deep spirit in her dark eyes, which we cannot fathom.”