DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--You see where at last we have arrived, at the end of the first _étape_ of this pilgrimage--the second station of the cross, so to speak--with the Continent over, and England about to begin. The land is bathed in greenish-yellow light and misty drizzle of rain. The little town, with its miniature brick walls and houses and nooks and coves and gardens, makes a curiously vivid and quaint picture, alternately suggesting English, Dutch, and Japanese effects that one has seen in pictures--all exceedingly tiny (so that one wonders how _families_ ever could have been reared in most of the houses) and neat and _zierlich_ to the last degree. _Refinement_ in architecture certainly consists in narrow trim and the absence of heavy mouldings. Modern Germany is incredibly bad from that point of view--much worse, apparently, than America. But the German people are a good safe fact for great powers to be intrusted to--earnest and serious, and pleasant to be with, as we found them, though it was humiliating enough to find how awfully imperfect were one's powers of conversing in their language. French not much better. I remember nothing of this extreme mortification in old times, and am inclined to think that it is due less to loss of ability to speak, than to the fact that, as you grow older, you speak better English, and expect more of yourself in the way of accomplishment. I am sure _you_ spoke no such English as now, in the seventies, when you came to Cambridge! And how could I, as yet untrained by conversation with you? Seven mortal weeks did we spend at the _Curort_, Nauheim, for an infirmity of the heart which I contracted, apparently, not much more than a year ago, and which now must be borne, along with the rest of the white man's burden, until additional visits to Nauheim have removed it altogether for ordinary practical purposes. N. was a sweetly pretty spot, but I longed for more activity. A glorious week in Switzerland, solid in its sometimes awful, sometimes beefy beauty; two days in Paris, where I could gladly have stayed the winter out, merely for the fun of the sight of the intelligent and interesting streets; then hither, where H. J. has a real little _bijou_ of a house and garden, and seems absolutely adapted to his environment, and very well and contented in the leisure to write and to read which the place affords.