But I did him a cruel injustice. If our two hearts and destinies are severed, it has been by the underground machinations of this Administration. General Grant saw what was going on, and has cruelly circumvented two young and unsophisticated hearts that were knitting together, like ivy round an oak sapling. I am determined on it. The country shall hear of my wrongs. Sprucehill shall have redress for the insult put upon her favorite daughter. In all that General Grant has done in the way of omission, nothing approaches the inactivity which has wrung my heart, as wet blankets are twisted in the strong hands of a washerwoman. _He_ has not written me a line. His letters must have been interrupted. Evil machinations have been at work. The Government detectives are everywhere scattering slanders and distrust. I shouldn't wonder a bit if they have been to our old homestead on Sprucehill, mousing among church registers, and interviewing family physicians. Well, let them. Since I learned to write, some figures have been changed in the old Family Bible, and, thank goodness! old Doctor Perry is dead. The keenest detective won't find much difference between 1830 and 1850. It only requires that the curve of the three should be rubbed out, and a dash sharpened to a point added. If they look for eighteen hundred and thirty there, I can tell them it isn't to be found. Let them search--that's all! This was my state of mind three days ago. Now I am revivified with extra animation. Hope has perched on my white hat and sits there waving its feather like a pennant. I am glad from the bottom of my heart that I didn't follow the duke across the ocean. After all a duke is only a man, hard to catch and expensive to cage. Why should we trouble ourselves about princes and dukes and lords, when we have the most genuine of all manly articles right under our feet. Dukes are scarce and hard to scare up, but there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. That's my motto to-day. LXXXIX. DONE UP IN A HURRY. Sisters:--the atmosphere of Long Branch is propitious, not to say exhilarating, for close by this half-mile of a hotel is another, crowded full at this time of the year, in which we can hear fiddling and dancing every night of the week. The hotels at watering-places are celebrated for several things, particularly low ceilings, widows, youngish ladies, and girls like our Cecilia, who wonder every day of their lives how their mothers ever got along decently till they were born to tell them how. Well, the most enterprising of these hotel accompaniments are the widows. Their superior advantages of experience is just overpowering, and these advantages are used with unscrupulous freedom. I say this with feeling, being one of the class that suffers from such unwarrantable competition.