MY DEAR COLONEL,—I had gone over with “the majority” [that is, to Europe], when your friendly card of May 9th was written, and it finally reached me at Venice. In that city of light, air, and heavenly noiselessness, my son and myself at last had settled ourselves in ideal rooms, overlooking the Grand Canal. We had seclusion, the Molo, the Lagoon, and a good café, and pure and cheap Capri wine. Our books and papers were unpacked for the first time, and I was ready to make an end of the big and burdensome book which I ought to have finished a year ago. _Dis aliter visum!_ The next morning I was awakened to receive news, by wire, of a business loss which brought me home, through the new Gothard tunnel and by the first steamer. Here I am, patching up other people’s blunders, with the thermometer in the nineties. I have lived through worse troubles, but am in no very good humor. Let me renew the amenities of life, by way of improving my disposition: and I’ll begin by thanking you for calling my attention to the error _in re_ Palfrey—which, of course, I shall correct. Another friend has written me to say that Lowell’s father was a Unitarian—not a Congregationalist. But Lowell himself told me, the other day, that his father never would call himself a Unitarian, and that he was old-fashioned in his home tenets and discipline. Mr. L. [Lowell] was under pretty heavy pressure, as you know, when I saw him, but holding his own with some composure—for a poet. Again thanking you, I am, Always truly yrs., E. C. STEDMAN. This must have been answered by some further expression of solicitude, for this reply came, two months later,— University Club, 370 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK, Sunday, Sept. 16, 1883. MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—There _is_ a good deal, say what you will, in “moral support.” I have proved it during the last few weeks: ’twould have been hard to get through with them, but for just such words as yours. And I have had them in such abundance that, despite rather poor displays of human nature in a sample of my own manufacture, I am less than ever a pessimist. As for that which Sophocles pronounced the father of meanness—πενία—both my wife and myself have been used to it nearly all our lives, and probably shall have, now, to renew our old acquaintance with it. Though somewhat demoralized by a few years of Philistine comfort—the _Persicos apparatus_, &c.—I think we shall get along with sufficient dignity. We have suffered more, however, than the money-loss, bad as that is. And hence we are doubly grateful to those who, like yourself, send a cheery voice to us at just this time. Ever sincerely yrs.,