"The first thing I do in the morning, and the last thing at night, is to pray to our Father in Heaven for you, my own dear Tom,—that he may take care of you; and, if it be his good will and pleasure, to bring you back safe and sound to us at home. I no longer wonder at some people being fond of travel. No wonder, for it has its charms and great ones too. It seems to me so very strange that the children and I,—in a few hours time, should be transported from the City of Buffalo to this romantic and almost ethereal home upon the hills of Western Canada, and then for me to turn around and think of you and the rest of the army battling away for freedom and union in the Fair South! We get the papers here every day. They are brought from the nearest post town which is three miles away, and then we all have such a scramble to hear the latest news from the seat of war, as they call it on their great headlines. It does not surprise me so much that we at home should make such an ado over the war news, but that these Canadians should also take so much interest as ourselves seems to me most astonishing indeed. It is just three miles from here to the post town, and one day we three went to spend the day with some relatives of the Gibsons. On an open space at the entrance to the town stood a large tent,—a kind of show called ’The War in the South.’ We paid the showman five cents apiece and went in to see the pictures of the war set out on the canvas. We looked through the round, bull-eye glasses, and the general effect was to magnify the whole scene to a very great extent. I must confess that after all that I have read and heard, this peep-show, or whatever else you may call it, gave me a better idea of the field of war, and its far-spreading extent than all I have ever learned from other sources,—all put together. "As we stood and looked we could see the long, fertile, southern plains under the noon-day sun; the woods and forest lay around them like a fringe in the distance; so minute and life-like did the very trees and bushes appear that I could almost tell what species they belonged to. Other pictures, in which we were ten times more interested, showed us the northern and southern armies on the march with flags flying, or else they were encamped on the edge of a wood among the lofty trees. There were also scenes of war and a battle which looked really too dreadful, even to behold the pictures of them. At such times I felt quite inclined to shut my eyes on such awful scenes. ’If such is the mere picture,’ I said to myself, ’what must the reality of actual war be.’ When we had thoroughly satisfied ourselves with this famous little peep-show, we came out, considering that we had had a good five cents’ worth,—I mean five cents a piece! And so we moved on to our friend’s house, where we had a most uncommonly warm welcome, and where we spent the whole day, some other friends coming in to see us during our pleasant visit.