492 LETTERS TO DARWIN AND OTHERS. [1862, 
No, dear Darwin, we don’t scorn your joining in the 
prayer that we daily offer that “ God would help our 
poor country,” and I know and appreciate your honest 
and right feeling. 
I see also, from the English papers I read, how you 
must picture us as in the extreme of turmoil and con- 
fusion and chaos. But if you were here, you would 
open your eyes to see everything going on quietly, 
hopefully, and comfortably as possible. I suppose we 
do not appreciate our miseries. We accept our mis- 
fortunes and adversities, but mean to retrieve them, 
and would sink all that we have before giving 
up. We work hard, and persevere, and expect to 
come out all right, to lay the foundations of a better 
future, no matter if they be laid in suffering. That 
will not hurt us now, and may bring great good here- 
after. 
I never saw, and have scarcely heard of, Miss 
Cooper’s book you ask after. She is the daughter of 
the late J. Fenimore Cooper, the novelist. The vil- 
lage she describes must be Cooperstown, New York, 
in the county adjacent to that in which I was brought 
up, — a region which, every time I visit it, I say it is 
the fairest of lands, and the people the happiest. 
Oh, as to the weeds; Mrs. Gray says she allows that 
our weeds give up to yours. Ours are modest, wood- 
and, retiring things, and no match for the intrusive, 
pretentious, self-asserting foreigners. But I send you 
seeds of one native weed which, corrupted by bad com- 
pany, is as nasty and troublesome as any I know, 
namely, Sicyos angulatus; also of a more genteel 
Cucurbitacea, Echinocystis lobata (the larger seeds). 
Upon these, especially upon the first, I made my ob- 
servation of tendrils coiling to the touch. Put the 
