DEAR PAPA,--I have been waiting to write till I should have something to say beyond the fact that the weather is odious, and shows no signs of relenting. On Saturday afternoon we had our meeting of the Royal Commissioners, which had for its object the hearing of an address from the Prince of Wales. On Monday morning the _whole_ International Jury (some six hundred or seven hundred members) met at the Ministère de Commerce, and was little more than formal. _To-day_ the group of sections which are concerned with Art held its first meeting under the presidency of Signor Tullio Massarani, an Italian, with Meissonier as Vice-President, the chief object of the meeting being to inform the various sections of the groups whom the Minister had appointed as their respective presidents. My section, composed of forty members, is _Paintings and Drawings_; there are twenty Frenchmen--nearly all the first artists of the country, in fact--and you will be surprised and very much gratified to learn that I was named president of this section--a very high honour, of course, and one of which I am extremely sensible, but which we must not misinterpret; it is, of course, only by an act of international courtesy that the French placed a foreigner at the head of their section, and amongst the other foreign artists there were few names of much weight or standing; still, it is a courtesy which will, I am sure, give you pleasure. Our section being thus constituted, we then appointed our own _vice_-president, reporter, and secretary; they were unanimously elected; the first was my old friend, Robert Fleury; the second was Emile de Savelege, the Belgian writer whom you know of; and the third an old and kind friend of mine, Maurice Cottier, a man much mixed up in the official artistic world and possessing a magnificent picture gallery. To-morrow we begin our labours at the Exhibition, and in the afternoon I shall go to the _séance_ of the _Institut_, which always takes place on Saturdays. This is my budget.