Monday, Aug 25, 1884 The Freeman tonight says there was frost in many places among the mountains last night. Today has been like an October today. Park and I took a walk after breakfast out over the hills North through the piece of woods near the Roatina where dear Gertrude and I went for ferns the last time we gathered any. What a sad and homesick feeling came over me as I lingered about that spot and thought of her. The summer is about gone and life seems growing more and more sad and sober. I was thinking today how many friends I used to have to whom I wrote. Now I have no correspondents and it is from no neglect on my part for I love to write to my friends, but one by one they have become absorbed in their own affairs or business or griefs and left me. We came home by the Roatina where I gave Park a swim. Poor Park is growing old too and he will not be a companion for a great while longer. I used to take so much pleasure roaming over this region and got many of the subjects for my pictures there. But it has changed and I am changed and my enthusiasms are sobered and I have cares and sorrows that I had not then. A letter came from Joe from N. Y. enclosing a check for $82 to pay me a balance on the picture "Burning Christmas Greens" which he bought of me in 1872. I thought it had all been settled except $50 which he got from the Express Co. for the first picture which was burned on the train and which I replaced by another. Joe had never paid on that however and my memorandum of the transaction I had marked paid and dismissed it from my thought. I wrote him a kind letter returning the check and telling him I considered it paid. I think Joe must be very unhappy. He is in N. Y. and apparently doing nothing for he wanted to go anywhere with me. I cannot leave now however and wrote him so. Laura, Mary, Sara and I sat in the parlor this evening and talked of those who are gone from this household with tears and with the aching sorrow that can never find words for its expression. I busied myself this afternoon gathering some of the pears which my dear mother always used to love to do.
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