Not having seen the sun but for three days (on board ship) since the eleventh, the natural gloom of my disposition and circumstances has been much aggravated. And I had in London and Paris a pretty melancholy time. I stayed but two days and one night in the latter place, which, according to the law of opposition that rules your opinions and mine, seemed to me a very tedious place. Its Haussmanization has produced a terribly monotonous-looking city--no expression of having _grown_, in any of the quarters I visited, and I did not have time to bring to the surface what power I may possess of sympathizing with the French way of being and doing. The awful thin and slow dinner in the tremendously imperial dining-room of the Hôtel du Louvre, the exaggerated neatness and order and reglementation of everything visible, contrasted with the volcanic situation of things at the present moment, all a-kinder turned my plain Yankee stomach, which has not yet recovered from the simpler lessons of joy it learnt at Scarboro and Magnolia last summer. I went to the Théâtre Français and heard a play in verse of Ponsard, thin stuff splendidly represented. Altogether I don't care if I never go to Paris again. London "impressed" me twelve times as much. Today in Italy my spirits have riz. The draggle-tailed physiognomy of the railway stations on the way here, the beautifully good-natured easy-going expression on the faces of the railway officials, the charming dialogue I have just had with the aged but angelic chambermaid whose phrases I managed to understand the sense of as a whole without recognizing any particular words--together with the consciousness of having for a time come to my journey's end and of the certainty of breakfasting tomorrow with the Angel, all let me go to bed with a light heart; hoping that yours is as much so, beloved Alice and all.... _To his Sister._ FLORENCE, _Nov. 23, 1873_. BELOVED SISTERKIN,--Your "nice long letter," as you call it, of Oct. 26 reached me five days ago, Mother's of November 4th yesterday, and with it one from Father to Harry. Though you will probably disbelieve me, I cannot help stating how agreeable it is to me to be once more in regular communication with that which, in spite of all shortcomings, is all that has ever been vouchsafed to me in the way of a "home" (and a mother). The hotel in which we live here is anything but home-like. In fact, when the heart aches for cosiness, etc., all it can do is to turn out into the street.