A thousand thanks, my dear Mr. Leighton, for the minute account of Westbury--as I cannot know anything about my sister, it is something to know how her house is settled and decorated, and how the place where she lives looks. The red velvet drawing-room sounds gorgeous, and it must be very becoming to the pictures. Of your pictures that have "wandered west" you may be sure I should have written you, if I had had the good news to give you that either of them was sold, but I am sorry to say this is not the case. The New York Exhibition is now closed, and the pictures have been sent back to Boston, where they are at present hanging in the Athenæum under the care of Mr. Ordway, who wishes, but does not much hope, to be able to sell them. It seems that one or two people asked the price of the pictures in New York, but considered it, when they received the information, "rather a tall price." I am a little consoled at the ill success of this venture of yours, by Henry Greville's writing me that your hands are full of orders, for which you are to be well paid. Your small acquaintance, Fanny, who left me this morning after a visit of a month, propounded to me the expediency of desiring the purchaser of the reconciliation of old Capulet and Montague to buy as its pendant the "Paris and Juliet"; and though she has no personal acquaintance with the lover of art in question, she said, when she got to Philadelphia she should set about intriguing to that effect; and she had my full permission to try and to succeed. I wish I could tell you anything pleasant in return for your description of the rooms at Westbury, but I have nothing very cheerful to impart. I have been quite unwell, and am still very far from flourishing; my spirits are much depressed, and the life I lead, of incessant worry and discomfort with servants and all one's domestic arrangements, is something quite too tedious to relate--and that indeed it would be impossible to _realise_, as the Yankees say, unless you witnessed it. I saw Hetty Hosmer three days after her arrival in Boston. Her father is a hopeless invalid, and she will certainly not leave him while he lives; but I suspect that he is likely to die before this year ends, and then she will return to live in Italy. The State of Missouri has voted two thousand pounds for a statue of Colonel Benton, one of its "great men," to be erected by her, which, of course, is a whole plume of feathers in her cap. Good-bye, dear Mr. Leighton; believe me always yours most truly, FANNY KEMBLE. You must not fail to write to me any directions that you wish observed about your pictures, while they remain here. I am only too glad to try to serve you.