Private

I don’t know that I have anything new to report, except that Livy is still gaining, & all the rest of f us flourishing. I haven’t had such booming working-days for many years. I am piling up manuscript in th a really astonishing way. I believe I shall complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for 5 7 years. This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie.

Day before yesterday I felt slightly warned to knock off work for one day. So I did it, & took to the open air. Then I struck an idea for the instruction of the children, & went to work & carried it out. It took me all day. I measured off 817 feet of the roadway in our farm grounds, with a yard foot-rule, & then divided it up among the English reigns, from the Conquest down to 1883, allowing one foot to the year. I whittled out a basket of little pegs & drove one in the ground at the beginning of each reign, & gave it that king’s name—thus:

I measured all the reigns exactly—as many feet to the reign as there were years in it. You can look out over the grounds & see the little pegs from the front door—some of them close together, like Richard II, Richard Cromwell, James II, &c; & some prodigiously wide apart, like Henry III, Edward III, George III, &c. It gives the children a realizing sense of the length or brevity of a reign. Shall invent a violent game to go with it.

And in bed, last night, I invented a way to play it indoors—in a far more voluminous way, as to multiplicity of dates & events—on a cribbage board.

Hello, supper’s ready. Love to all. Good bye.