I don’t wonder that you feel sad at the thought of losing the Nortons. They have been and are more to me than I can tell. But you will see them all again, when you come to make your visit to me, which I look upon as pledged. It is as easy to get to us as to Switzerland, and you shall sleep now and then in the ice-chest to make you comfortable. The roof of the barn is pretty slippery and the ground below hard enough to give you a smart Alpine shock. By the way, what you say about Switzerland in July delights me. Remember that my address is always to the care of the Barings, and let me know where you are to be and when. I have a sort of glimmering of Lausanne, where I could exist cheaply, for though on pleasure I am bent, I am forced to have a frugal mind. But I am more and more convinced that a man (especially a grandfather) is most comfortable when he has worn his ruts deepest, and I should fly over the deep to-morrow if I could. It is ignoble, but it is true. I always hated the sights _qu’il faut voir_, and now there is no hope of strangeness anywhere. Man is a most uninventive animal--you scratch through the nationality and there _he_ is underneath--the very bore you were running away from. However, I am rested and grown so stout that I have positively had to let out a reef in my trousers. I reckon on a very jolly time in London, because I shall always be in the tremor of going away--though I am almost sorry that I am going when I think of saying good-by to the Nortons. I am sorry you did not see more of Emerson; he is good to love, and if his head be sometimes in thin and difficult air, his heart never is. He must have left London, then? Gay told me he met you at the Nortons, and kept calling you Stevens, and I irascibly correcting him as I would a vicious proofsheet. I don’t know why, but I am always exasperated when anybody pluralizes you. Whether it is that I hold you to be unique, or that I was once cheated by a man named Stevens, I can’t tell. However, Gay is a good fellow and a good artist for all that. Why is it that people do so? They always call Child _Childs_ in the same fashion. My eyes gave out some time ago, so I will only say that I shall go straight to Cleveland Place Tuesday morning, and if you dropt in on your way down town, it would be the best possible world so long as it lasted. _To C. E. Norton._ (Passenger by “Olympus.”) PARIS, 13 May, 1873.