My dear Molly,--It 's well I ever got your last letter, for it seems there's four places called Freyburg, and they tried the three wrong ones first, and I believe they opened and read it everywhere it stopped. "Much good may it do them," says I, "if they did!" They know at least the price of wool in Kinnegad, and what boneens is bringing in Ballinasloe, not to mention the news you tell of Betty Walsh! I thought I cautioned you before not to write anything like a secret when the letter came through a foreign post, seeing that the police reads everything, and if there's a word against themselves, you're ordered over the frontier in six hours. That's liberty, my dear! But that is not the worst of it, for nobody wants the dirty spalpeens to read about their private affairs, nor to know the secrets of their families. I must say, you are very unguarded in this respect, and poor Betty's mishap is now known to the Emperor of Prussia and the King of Sweden, just as well as to Father Luke and the Coadjutor; and as they say that these courts are always exchanging gossip with each other, it will be back in England by the time this reaches you. Let it be a caution to you in future, or, if you must allude to these events, do it in a way that can't be understood, as you may remark they do in the newspapers. I wish you would n't be tormenting me about coming home and living among my own people, as you call it. Let them pay up the arrears first Molly, before they think of establishing any claim of the kind on your humble servant. But the fact is, my dear, the longer you live abroad, the more you like it; and going back to the strict rules and habits of England, after it, is for all the world like putting on a strait-waistcoat. If you only heard foreigners the way they talk of us, and we all the while thinking ourselves the very pink of the creation! But of all the things they're most severe upon is Sunday. The manner we pass the day, according to their notions, is downright barbarism. No diversion of any kind, no dancing, no theatres; shops shut up, and nothing legal but intoxication. I always tell them that the fault isn't ours, that it's the Protestants that do these things; for, as Father Maher says, "they 'd put a bit of crape over the blessed sun if they could." But between ourselves, Molly, even we Catholics are greatly behind the foreigners on all matters of civilization. It may be out of fear of the others, but really we don't enjoy ourselves at all like the French or the Germans. Even in the little place I'm writing now, there's more amusement than in a big city at home; and if there's anything I 'm convinced of at all, Molly, it's this: that there is no keeping people out of great wickedness except by employing them in small sins; and, let me tell you, there's not a political economist that ever I heard of has hit upon the secret.