Of course I put much of this down to the score of illness, and of bad health before he was so ill; but, depend upon it, he's not the man we knew him. Heaven knows if he ever will be so again. The night I arrived here he was more natural, more like himself, in fact, than he has ever been since. His manner was heartier, and in his welcome there was a touch of the old jovial good fellow, who never was so happy as when sharing his quarters with a comrade. Since that he has grown punctilious, anxiously asking me if I am comfortable, and teasing me with apologies for what I don't miss, and excuses about things that I should never have discovered wanting. I think I see what is passing within him; he wants to be confidential, and he does n't know how to go about it. I suppose he looks on me as rather a rough father to confess to; he is n't quite sure what kind of sympathy, if any, he 'll meet with from me, and he more than half dreads a certain careless, outspoken way in which I have now and then addressed his boy, of whom more anon. I may be right, or I may be wrong, in this conjecture; but certain it is, that nothing like confidential conversation has yet passed between us, and each day seems to render the prospect of such only less and less likely. I wish from my heart you were here; you are just the fellow to suit him,--just calculated to nourish the susceptibilities that _I_ only shock. I said as much t' other day, in a half-careless way, and he immediately caught it up, and said, “Ay, George, Upton is a man one wants now and then in life, and when the moment comes, there is no such thing as a substitute for him.” In a joking manner, I then remarked, “Why not come over to see him?” “Leave this!” cried he; “venture in the world again; expose myself to its brutal insolence, or still more brutal pity!” In a torrent of passion, he went on in this strain, till I heartily regretted that I had ever touched this unlucky topic. I date his greatest reserve from that same moment; and I am sure he is disposed to connect me with the casual suggestion to go over to Stuttgard, and deems me, in consequence, one utterly deficient in all true feeling and delicacy.