Cheerful Things

Cheerful Things While cheerful things to me you say, oh friend of mine, in the letter open before me - the letter welcome as [this - crossed out] a day like this, after such a winter as ours. It is not hard to write of cheerful things when the voices of so many old time friends are making so merry this warm April night. To there not all of the coming springtime in the sound that comes up on the night air, from every hidden brookside or marsh; as well as volumes of memory for one who was a pioneer's daughter; [and knew - crossed out] Did she not know that when the voice of the frog was "heard in the land" (or in the water) There were sure to be cresses, half floating with the stream while clinging securely among the pebbels with them long

silvery rootlets . And were there no cowslips, and blue bells, and violets and buttercups and dandelions all growing in friendly neighborhood along the stream? And didnot those winged flowers; the yellow butterflies come in swarms to visit them? Only they would flit away from the little hands that longed to touch them And in the woods! Oh what were there treasures were there. Not adder tongues, [heparticas?] anemones - what crowds of them trilliums popper tops and all the gay and green things that hurry to meet the tardy Spring at her coming?

All this and more the pen can write, comes back in memory, again and again when the first hesitating "peep" comes up from the half froze bird or bibed whose home is under [Vie?]

water and whose holiday is ever welcome ______________________ ___________

If I should write the first and dearest things of cheer that comes to my mind you would think I was bidding you to to "[think on your mareies - all underlined] __as poor old Uncle Tom with few mareies - underlined] to think "on" of, told and Chloe by way of consoling her when he was sold South.

But as I walk along the pleasant streets and see the swelling buds on roses and lilacs and syringas in my neighbors yards, and lilies crocus and hosts of bulbous things sending up their green tips "sticking up their little noses" as a gleeful child used to say thirty long years ago, and

I think as I gaze what a cheerful [happy - underlined] thing

5 the first hesitating clover leaf springing under our feet just where the same faithful green has come year after year -- are not [these things - underlined], and such as these things of cheer that so unusual, out of the every-day-things can be?

And you have all of these things, and may look forward to a continuance of them with no "pulling of tacks" in some body elses chambers by way of "[pet?] occupation" for leisure moments -

Madam Roland ex 9 - 1793 Suicide Jean Marie Roland 15 1793