DEAREST FANNY,--You see where we are! I give _you_ the first news of life's journey being so far advanced! It is a deadly enterprise, I'm afraid, with the social entanglements that lie ahead, and I feel a cake of ice in my epigastrium at the prospect, but _le vin est versé, il faut le boire_, and from the other point of view, that it is real life beginning once more, it is perfectly glorious, and I feel as if yesterday in leaving London I had said good-bye to a rather dreadful and death-bound segment of life. As regards the sociability, it is fortunately a time of year in which only the medical part of the University is present. The professors of the other faculties are already in large part scattered, I think,--at least the two Seths (who are the only ones I directly know) are away, and I have written to the Secretary of the Academic Senate, Sir Ludovic Grant of the Law Faculty, that I am unable to "dine out" or attend afternoon receptions, so we may be pretty well left alone. I always hated lecturing except as regular instruction to students, of whom there will probably be none now in the audience. But to compensate, there begins next week a big convocation here of all ministers in Scotland, and there will doubtless be a number of them present, which, considering the matter to be offered, is probably better. We had a splendid journey yesterday in an American (almost!) train, first-class, and had the pleasure of some talk with our Cambridge neighbor, Mrs. Ole Bull, on her way to Norway to the unveiling of a monument to her husband. She was accompanied by an extraordinarily fine character and mind--odd way of expressing myself!--a young Englishwoman named Noble, who has Hinduized herself (converted by Vivekananda to his philosophy) and lives now for the Hindu people. These free individuals who live their own life, no matter what domestic prejudices have to be snapped, are on the whole a refreshing sight to me, who can do nothing of the kind myself. And Miss Noble[34] is a most deliberate and balanced person--no frothy enthusiast in point of character, though I believe her philosophy to be more or less false. Perhaps no more so than anyone else's! We are in one of those deadly respectable hotels where you have to ring the front-door-bell. Give me a cheerful, blackguardly place like the Charing Cross, where we were in London. The London tailor and shirtmaker, it being in the height of the Season, didn't fulfill their promises; and as I sloughed my ancient cocoon at Rye, trusting to pick up my iridescent wings the day before yesterday in passing through the metropolis, I am here with but two _chemises_ at present (one of them now in the wash) and fear that tomorrow, in spite of tailors' promises to send, I may have to lecture in my pyjamas--that would give a cachet of American originality. The weather is fine--we have just finished breakfast.