This letter--a letter written from the fulness of a kind and sympathising heart--found Arthur Vavasour at Liverpool, to which city he had resorted for the purpose of taking steam to the great republic--the land of _soi-disant_ liberty--the land of the “stars and stripes,” “unwhipped and unwhippable for ever.” (I wonder, writing of that self-same flag, that some zealous descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers--some red-hot Yankee, friend and supporter of his black-bodied brethren--has not ere this voted for the suppression of the ruled, gingham-suggestive portion of the “glorious flag,” for now that the negro back is free from suffering, and the weary “son of Afric” need no longer toil, the stripes would seem, one might suppose, a worse than unnecessary, because a painful, reminder of the disgraceful past.) But to return to Arthur Vavasour in the half-Americanised city, and in the big hotel to which the love of the turtle has drawn many a man who, like me and, perhaps, you, O gentle reader, has no thought whatever of crossing the broad Atlantic in a Cunard steamer. Had those afflicted ones, who so deeply commiserated the forlorn lot of this poor widower, been enabled at that moment (Asmodeus-like) to look upon his saddened face, and form their own opinions, unbiassed either by prejudice or pity, they could hardly have decided that the events of the past month had told very severely upon this young British Sybarite. At twenty-two it is very easy to forget, and with the world (a considerable portion of it, that is to say) untried and unexplored before him, a young man of good birth, the eventual possessor of such an estate as Gillingham (for even Lady Millicent could not prevent the family property from descending after her death to her eldest son)--with, I repeat, such prospects as these, to say nothing of good health and a handsome person, it is hardly surprising that Arthur Vavasour should have felt very far from utterly cast down by the changes and chances of this mortal life, of which he had lately had such painful as well as mortifying experience. He was not alone, for, seated by the open window in a rocking-chair, and reading the last number of the _Field_, then a new publication, sat a young man whose name was Godfrey Tremlett, and who, having been a college friend--the _fidus Achates_ of his semi-boyish days--had kindly consented to share the wanderings of the disappointed man in the lands beyond the sea, where the heavy foot of the buffalo tramples the silent prairie, and where, flying slowly but surely before civilisation, the red Indian (baptised with the baptism of the Christian’s “fire-water”) endures his lot with patience, looking, with stolid face and all a wild man’s stupid singleness of heart, to a better, that is, a more sporting country in the happy hunting-grounds where a good savage meets his due reward; in other words, Arthur and his companion’s point was Fort Jasper, and their intentions were to witch