Did you take home any stones for our cabinets? Does the collecting fit continue, or has it vanished with the departure of Mr. Hildreth? I have not obtained many specimens as yet; little Sarah Dickson takes great interest in bringing me what she considers pretty rocks, and putting them on a newspaper on my window seat. I was really surprised the other day to see how pretty they looked, though, of course, not of much value—little bits of quartz, white, grey, brown, pink; a stone full of mica, which looks like a piece of lead ore; a conglomerate of gneiss quartz tinged with some metallic substances, and with garnets embedded in some of the stones; and flints of various colours; nothing to a professed mineralogist, but pleasing to me. Last week I went to a party at Mrs. P.’s. She has a separate establishment from the hotel, with which she does not choose to have anything to do. I was invited to meet some Charleston ladies who had called on me, and made themselves very agreeable. I suppose you would have been most pleased with the eatables (the ice-cream, whips, jelly, and cakes were delicious), but what delighted me was a little Channing glorification (M. will understand what I mean) that Mrs. Carr (the lady who so resembles Ellen Channing) and I held in the garden. She has never seen our Mr. Channing, but the Doctor used to visit at their house, and she described with enthusiasm a splendid sermon that she heard him deliver in Philadelphia. I replied by describing the eloquence of our Mr. C. Then she expatiated on the kindness and loveliness of the Doctor’s character, to which I added a description of the goodness, purity, and the angelicalness of his nephew; whereupon she expressed a great desire to see him, and I said that I should consider it one of the greatest of blessings to have enjoyed the social intercourse of the good Doctor. The conversation was quite a treat to me—a sort of safety-valve to heterodox steam that I lacked so deplorably at Henderson. My playing seemed to give satisfaction; the piano is a beautiful one, like ours on a more brilliant scale, and as there was no one to rival me in the instrumental way I raised the top, played the ‘Pot Pourri,’ and made a tremendous noise. (I do wish that minister would stop singing his nasal hymn-tunes just underneath me; he has been at it all day, and it quite puts me out.)