A few mornings later a four-horse carriage halted by the consulate and we started for the Engadine, that lofty Alpine valley that is coursed for a hundred miles by the river Inn. This is not a valley of desolation. It is broad and productive, and once had many people and a little government of its own. To-day there are pretty villages at long distances and Insbruck is a picturesque and historic town. But the Inn valley is sky high compared with other rich valleys of Europe. We had bright sunshine and a delicious mountain air all the way. The Inn is rapid and beautiful, and right and left, for twenty miles at a stretch, rise high green hills, or else abrupt and lofty mountains, with sometimes bold and almost perpendicular crags. If we saw a rock that looked extraordinarily picturesque, away up toward the blue sky, there were sure to be also there the romantic ruins of some old castle. It seemed that we passed a hundred of these lofty ruins, with broken towers and fallen walls, through whose tall arches we sometimes saw patches of blue sky. Eagles soared around many of these lofty and deserted ruins. As we two drove for miles and miles along the white winding road by the river we constantly looked up at the romantic heights, and in our minds re-peopled the gray old castles and thought of the time, a thousand years ago, when all the peasantry of the rich valley were the serfs of masters who reveled in these castles built with the toil of the poor. A time came when the enslaved rose and all these castles were overthrown or burned and left as they are to-day. There are ruins high up above this Inn valley that, doubtless, have not been visited by a human footstep in a hundred years. Most of them are inaccessible. The former roads cut up the rocky mountain sides to them, are gone and forgotten, and the heights with their awful ridges against the sky look as desolate as the desert. We closed our delightful journey with a visit to the World’s Fair at Vienna. Barring the Swiss National Exhibition, I have never seen anything so fine. On my return I found this letter from General Sherman waiting me. In it, he expresses regret that his active career seems over: “WASHINGTON, D. C., July 14, 1873.