“There is a fourth reason why I do rejoice in my election. It is because I know that _you_ will rejoice in it. It is _you_ my friend who have made me high-thoughted and far-thoughted. It is _you_ who during the last twenty years have been my good genius—in your conversation when present with me—in your correspondence when absent from——” I read the rest of the letter to my wife, but it is entirely too flattering to me to be coolly written out here. Indeed I remarked all along, through the three more pages which followed, to my wife, that his encomiums were only the warm expressions of a warm soul unusually excited, and which must be taken with all allowance. Charley’s letter flushed me through and through. That my old friend should be elected Senator to congress from his State I hoped but hardly expected. Intimate companionship with a friend, you know, has a tendency to dwindle him in our eyes. Don’t misunderstand! Intimacy with such a man as Charles Bell makes one love and prize him more and more—but does _not_ make one think more and more that such a man is suited to be a grave and reserved Senator. It is just as it is with the Swiss peasant whose cabin is on a side of Mont Blanc—the hoary old mountain does not appear a tithe so sublime to him as it does to some traveler in the distance. I say I felt thoroughly warmed and rejoiced. I arose, put all my wife’s spools and scraps off the table into her lap, laid my portfolio and ink-stand upon it, begged my wife to absorb herself in her baby’s velvet cap, dipped my pen in the ink and now have written thus far. All my past intercourse with Charley rushes to my lips now, as tears do sometimes to one’s eyes. I want to tell just as briefly and distinctly as possible how he has risen from nothing to what he now is. I know much better than he—and if he reads this, it will do him good. Any-how, I feel in the mood of writing, and before I go to bed, if my baby don’t wake with the colic and my wife don’t interrupt me I will tell you exactly how Charley Bell became a United States Senator. The fact is, too, that I have a half-hope that some youth may read this and may get a word which may wake _him_ to a higher and nobler life than he has ever yet dreamed of. If the eye of any such a one rests on these pages, just one word my fine fellow. Forget for a little while that everlasting Julia whom you fell in love with last Tuesday a week ago, and read with all your soul of souls.