I find it so easy to trace a smile to its source: so difficult to define the lasting charm that lies behind it! And even when the definition is at hand my tongue halts at eulogy. Odd! I love to be praised and remembrance offers no instance when I have been in fear lest appreciation should sink to flattery. But when I try to praise others--even as they deserve--I am overtaken by a feeling of delicacy on their behalf which I have never felt for myself. And so I end dumb on the very threshold of my theme. I should like to say a great number of things of you and your husband, but somehow it doesn’t seem possible. Some day, when I meet a stranger in the train at one of those odd moments when by some irresistible impulse, I am driven to confide to a chance acquaintance secrets that through a long life I have hidden from my dearest friends--I shall say something about you and him that you might like to hear. But I can’t command the hour and meanwhile, you see, I am no further than when I began. All I can say is that, if ever you ask me to your house again, let nothing be changed from what it was, for it could not be changed for the better. Yours ever truly, J. W. COMYNS CARR.” After this epistle it may not be thought partial on my part to state that, from the days of our youthful visits to Balcarres to the end of his life, my husband was a welcome guest at country houses; the following, in reply to a request from Mrs. F. D. Millet of Broadway, that he should relieve the strain of a spell of female society upon her husband, seems to show this. “MY DEAR MRS. MILLET, I ought not, but I will! And lest I should falter in my bad resolution, I have already wired to you saying I should be down on Saturday. It is a strange thing about duty. I believe there is no one who sees what is facetiously called “the path of duty” more clearly than I do; but we are differently gifted, and I fancy I never was intended to walk in it. Like the criminal who acquires in the end an extensive knowledge of law by industriously incurring its penalties, I believe that if I could recall all the moral maxims I have neglected in practice, I might serve as a veritable storehouse of wisdom and good conduct. And so it happens that, though I see clearly I ought to stay in town and work, I am nevertheless determined to accept your kind invitation and come to you on Saturday next. Tell Frank to defer suicide till after that date. I can indeed well understand his melancholy. No man can dwell long in the exclusive society of women without being crushed by the sense of his own unworthiness. We are not fit for it. I often wish there were some bad women in the world, with whom we might associate in our baser moments, and sometimes, in a dreary mood, I am apt to wonder what women can have been like before the Fall, they are so perfect now. Perhaps in another world we shall be better and you will be worse; let us hope for the best.