are in the Boston Athenæum, very safe, and highly ornamental to it, but not, I regret to say, sold. If you wish me to do anything more about them, you must write me your directions, which I will fulfil with every attention and accuracy of which I am capable. LENOX, _Sunday, November 11_. I trust before long you will receive your children safe and sound. I wish the two hundred pounds I have lost this year had been invested in one of those pictures instead of in St. Louis. Thank you for your account of Adelaide and her children; it is not much, but it is all that much better than nothing. The state of the country is very sad, and any probable termination of the war quite out of calculable distance. England, no doubt, will maintain her absolute neutrality in spite of secession, cotton, and anti-slavery sympathies; it is her only part. Good-bye, dear Mr. Leighton. I beg you will not scruple to write me now if there is anything more that I can do, either in the matter of the pictures or any other by which I can be of use to you here. NEW YORK, _Sunday, March 10_. I am sure you have not forgotten the charming farmhouse at West Mion, to which you and your sketch-book were the means of introducing us, ---- farm: well, his brother is one of the richest shopkeepers in New York--and, upon the strength of my visit to the paternal acres in Hampshire, his wife, a funny little specimen of vivacious vulgarity, called upon me, and I, of course, upon her. I was shown into a drawing-room at least thirty feet long, with two massive white marble chimney-pieces, green silk brocade curtains and furniture to match, magnificent carpets, mirrors, gildings, hideous _works_ in marble on scagliola pillars--in short, the most marvellous palace of shopkeepers' _beaux ideaux_ that you can conceive; through this to a beautifully fitted-up library; through this to a picture gallery, noble _seigneur_, _pensez y bien_! Oh, my dear Frederic Leighton, it was enough to make one fall down and foam at the mouth, to see such a hideous collection of daubs and to think of the money hanging on those walls; and then I thought of your pictures, and why the wretched man couldn't have procured them for some of his foolish money; and then I begged your pardon internally for the desecration of imagining your pictures in such company; and then I gazed amusedly about me, and at length gave tongue: "Mr. ----," said I, "this is a vastly different residence from the old homestead in Hampshire." The worthy man could not see in my heart which way the balance of preference inclined, and answered with benignant self-satisfaction: "Ah,