Sumter, S. C.
Apr. 1, 1867

Dear Fuller:

Just one word, while I am waiting for a man to come for me to write a letter for him. That is one of the disagreeables of our life down here. Any day, at any hour, they come with their dirty, greasy, crumpled paper, to inform their friends that they are well, and hope their friends are well, and so on to the end of the sheet.

Tuesday evening.

I received a letter from you today mailed the 22nd February. (It contained the solution to the puzzle you sent before.) It disliked leaving its native rocks & hills, so it "shied off" to Sunapee, N. H.

Friday evening.

Oh, dear, when shall I ever have time to write any more letters, decent ones I mean.

I think I shall send you a printed one this time as a substitute. Don't take it as a specimen of the best I can do, for I can write better sometimes--at least I think so. I wrote in compliance with the request of Rev. Lowe, the Sec. of our (Unitarian) Association, and was more anxious to fill my sheet than anything else.

Friend, if you think me egregiously conceited, tell me so. It will not bust me. I get flattery enough in all conscience on all sides. I need something to counteract it. Believe one thing, though;--that I don't write to anybody else what I write to you. I wouldn't send to any else the enclosed letter.

You spoke in one of your letters of the Temperance controversy going on in our glorious Bay state. I have not read enough of it to understand it very well. One of my friends writes to me, "I don't believe they ("the rummies") will succeed. They say the prohibitory law is a failure but nothing about it has failed but the officers who ought to have enforced it. Recently the State constables have got to work & have shut up thousands of rum-shops in the state. They are (to the rumsellers) painfully demonstrating the fact that the law is not a failure, and that's what's the matter. It looks a little now as if the temperance people of Mass. were to make that question the issue of the polls next fall. I hope so. It would do us good. We ought to thrash the rummies if we can. If we are too weak for that we ought to know it by being thrashed ourselves."

I must tell you a little incident which amused me in school the other day. I was putting my boys through a course of map questions, on the Map of North America; asking as they named the divisions to whom does it belong? Coming to the United Sates I asked the same question expecting the answer to be: "Independent." Fancy my feelings when the little wretches yelled in chorus--"To the North!"

I have a letter from Charlotte this week. She invites me to come "and stay all summer." Royal, isn't it? How I should like it had I no duties elsewhere. She and Milton have given me kind and repeated invitations to make my home there.

I wish you could share my wealth of flowers. Roses, azaleas, jasmine, violets, hawthorne, besides ever so many that I don't know, and tonight a woman brought me two superb japonicas. Our room looks like a greenhouse.

I hope the time will come, my Friend, when you will not have to take such poor apologies for letters. Till then believe me

Truly yours

Jane B. Smith

F. F. Fisk, Esq
Mast Yard, N. H.