[Boston—Sunday, 9 March 1873]
Sunday. March 9 th A cold blustering day—it is peaceful inside, for we have no guests, wonderful to relate and Jamie is writing quietly upon his Professor Wilson paper, which he is making, to my thinking, most interesting and valuable. We are thinking much of Celia, who is at her Islands, where Karen one of the Norwegian girls of whom she writes, has been most foully murdered. She must be feeling the shock most bitterly. Roused in the night by the fire-alarm close by, while I waited alone watching the flames (which were soon subdued however) I saw Celia in my mind’s eye wandering about that lonely wintry coast and gazing down upon the white faces of those murdered girls.
Jamie went to the Ladies’ Club this week which met at Miss Susan Dorr’s. Miss Dorr was in such an excitement, he said, that he could think of nothing but a chicken whose neck has been wrung and who was hopping about the yard wildly with its head dangling. Sidney Woollett read.
Whittier has been in town and came here to breakfast one day this week. I was not well enough to see him. He has been occupied in getting a petition in behalf of Charles Sumner through the Senate Chamber. We do not yet know the result.
