My dear Bob,--I copy the following paragraph from the "Galignani" of yesterday: "Considerable excitement has been caused amongst the fashionable visitors of Baden by the rumored elopement of the charming Mrs. G * * * H * * *. * * with an Irish gentleman of large fortune, and who, though considerably past the prime of life, is evidently not beyond the age of fascination. Our readers will appreciate the reserve with which we only allude to a report, the bare mention of which will doubtless give the deepest distress amongst a wide circle of our very highest aristocracy." Probably all your conic sections and spherical trigonometry learning would never enable you to read the riddle aright, and so I shall save you the profitless effort by saying that the delinquent so delicately indicated in the above is no other than the worthy governor himself. Ay, Bob, as the old song says,-- "No age, no profession, nor station is free, To sovereign beauty mankind bends the knee;" and how should it be expected that Dodd père could resist the soft impeachment? To be as intelligible as the circumstances permit, I must ask of you to call to mind a certain very beautiful fellow-traveller of ours,--a Mrs. Gore Hampton. She is the Dido of this Æneid. Not that there is in reality any--even the remotest--shade of truth in the newspaper paragraph; the entire event being explicable upon far less romantic and less interesting grounds. Mrs. G. H. having desired the protection of my father's escort to some small town in Germany, and not wishing to excite the inevitable hostility of my mother to the arrangement, determined upon a night march, without beat of drum. In this way was the fortress evacuated; and when the garrison were mustered for duty, Dodd père was reported missing. Tiverton, who was in the secret throughout, explained everything to me, and I as readily imparted the explanation to the girls; but all our endeavors to convince my mother were totally fruitless. "She knew him of old,"--"she guessed many a day since what he was,"--"it was not now that she had to read his character,"--these and similar intimations, coupled with others even stronger and less flattering as regarded his time of life, manners, and personal advantages, were more than enough to drown all our arguments; and I must confess that she arranged the details of circumstantial evidence against him with a degree of art and dexterity that might have reflected credit on a Crown lawyer. Of course, the first three or four days after the event were not of the pleasantest; for, not satisfied with the sympathies of a home circle, my mother empanelled "special juries" of the waiters and chambermaids, and arraigned the unlucky governor on a series of charges extending to a period far beyond the "statute of limitations."