It was a loss to American life and letters when Sam Walter Foss passed away from us at the height of his strong true manhood. Later he will be regarded as an eminent American. He was true to our age to the core. Whether he wrote of the gentle McKinley, the fighting Dewey, the ludicrous schoolboy, the "grand eternal fellows" that are coming to this world after we have left it--he was ever a weaver at the loom of highest thought. The world is not to be civilized and redeemed by the apostles of steel and brute force. Not the Hannibals and Caesars and Kaisers but the Shelleys, the Scotts, and the Fosses are our saviours. They will have a large part in the future of the world to heighten and brighten life and justify the ways of God to men. These and such as these are our consolation in life's thorny pathway. They keep alive in us the memory of our youth and many a jaded traveller as he listens to their music, sees again the apple blossoms falling around him in the twilight of some unforgotten spring. PETER MacQUEEN. Peter MacQueen was brought to my house years ago by a friend when he happened to be stationary for an hour, and he is certainly a unique and interesting character, a marvellous talker, reciter of Scotch ballads, a maker of epigrams, and a most unpractical, now-you-see-him and now-he's-a-far-away-fellow. I remember his remark, "Breakfast is a fatal habit." It was not the breakfast to which he referred but to the gathering round a table at a stated hour, far too early, when not in a mood for society or for conversation. And again: "I have decided never to marry. A poor girl is a burden; a rich girl a boss." But you never can tell. He is now a Benedict. I wrote to Mr. MacQueen lately for some of his press notices, and a few of the names which he called himself when I received his letters. MY DEAR KATE SANBORN:--Yours here and I hasten to reply. Count Tolstoi remarked to me: "Your travels have been so vast and you have been with so many peoples and races, that an account of them would constitute a philosophy in itself." Theodore Roosevelt said, "No other American has travelled over our new possessions more universally, nor observed the conditions in them so quickly and sanely." Kennan was _persona non grata_ to the Russians, especially after his visit to Siberia, but Mr. MacQueen was most cordially welcomed. What an odd scene at Tolstoi's table! The countess and her daughter in full evening dress with the display of jewels, and at the other end Tolstoi in the roughest sort of peasant dress and with bare feet. At dinner Count Tolstoi said to Mr. MacQueen: "If I had travelled as much as you have, I should today have had a broader philosophy." Mr. MacQueen says of Russia: