Our stay in Kansas City was limited to a few hours, but in that time some of us ventured out on the streets, which were not very inviting, down on the bottom lands among the grime of the railroad tracks. Kansas City lies, the best part of it, on high bluffs overlooking the great Missouri River, and its tributary, at this point, the Kaw. It is really a picturesque place, and capable of being beautified to any extent. The bluffs are quite precipitous, and on their shelving sides a number of squatters have settled, with their nondescript cabins and huts, giving a sort of rag-fair look to the general aspect of the town as seen as a whole. But the City Fathers have awakened to the fact, that those precipitous bluffs can be made highly ornamental, by green sod and trees and flowers. A great park plan has been projected for all those curving spaces, and ere long the city will be made unique and beautiful by those winding, aspiring, and splendid plantations, out of which the homes, the churches, and public buildings will rise as from a garden. In our brief stay we called on our dear and old-time friend, the Rev. J. Stewart Smith, of St. Mary's, or, rather, I should say he called on us, for, having announced our coming by telegraph, he was there at the station to meet us. It so happened that a day or two before he had written, for one of the local papers, his recollection of the great fight between the Merrimac and the Monitor in Hampton Roads in the year 1862. How much has transpired since then! In view of it all, and our Cuban War still on, all now happily over as I write, I thought that my dear friend's recollections would be of interest, as that of an eye-witness of that great first battle between armored ships. Here is what he says: "One of my earliest recollections is of the United States frigate, Merrimac, which anchored off Norfolk in 1855 before making her first voyage. Like most small boys, I was deeply interested in anything that would float, and when one of the officers took me on board and showed me everything to be seen, explaining, so far as was possible to make a child understand, the workings of a warship, I was perfectly happy. I asked many questions, and ever afterward I felt a peculiar interest--almost a sense of ownership--in that vessel. "At the beginning of the war the Merrimac was again in Hampton Roads, undergoing repairs at the navy yard, just across the river from Norfolk. One Saturday night early in April, 1861, Norfolk was abandoned by the Federal forces. The next day the dry dock was blown up, the navy yard, all the smaller crafts, the Pennsylvania, perhaps the largest vessel in the service--too large, in fact, to be seaworthy, but which had been for years used as a training-ship at the port--and the Merrimac were set on fire.