_September 25, 1876._--We are in the middle of the Atlantic. On the 16th, we left London on the Anglia. Mr. Benjamin, the marine artist (afterward Minister to Persia), is among the passengers. He made sea sketches, all the way. Kate Sherwood Bonner, a Southern literary woman, who put staid old Boston in an uproar last year by stirring up some of the effete clubs of culture that did not cultivate, is also on board. She is bright and beautiful, with her golden hair, and has the fairest white hands imaginable. A strange incident made us acquainted. She mentioned her home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and in a moment I knew that once in the war times I was a sick soldier in that very house. I saw death scenes in its elegant chambers, in her own boudoir, of friend and foe, too horrible to relate. The weather is perfect. We sail to Canada. There is not a sick soul on board. Everybody knows everybody, and there are concerts and recitations and fun in the cabin every night. All the day we play games on the deck. Nobody wants this journey to come to an end. We saw an iceberg, and we saw a whale (yesterday). We offered the Captain $20 to stop the ship, put us down in life boats and let us row close to the iceberg. He refused. “Company at London would raise a row,” he said. We were so close, however, we could see beautiful little inlets and bays worn in among the high walls of the crystal island, against which the sea was dashing. The ice was several hundred feet high, clear blue-green, and the sight, with the evening sun striking it, was altogether novel and beautiful. We stood on the deck and watched it for twenty miles. When we were near to it, the Captain said there was a terrible drop in the temperature of the sea water. We were sixteen days reaching New York. _October 4._--Visiting the Centennial. By mere accident, found telegrams telling us of the sudden death of my wife’s father, while we have been having so long a voyage at sea. He was buried the day we reached New York. Owing to the length of the voyage they had given up finding us. William Gilmour was an educated Scotchman and a noble man, from near Burns’ home, where his brother John had been one of Scotia’s young bards. In October, we visited home friends in the West, and returning East, staid a time in Washington, visiting at the home of General Sherman and elsewhere. Horatio King, then having weekly “Literary Evenings” at his home, invited us often. These evenings did more to enliven a taste in Washington society for books and high culture than any other one thing in that whirl of politics and pretentiousness. King had been President Buchanan’s Postmaster-General. He knew almost everybody in art and literature in the country, and the people one met at his home were always interesting. I regarded it a great pleasure to go to his “Evenings.” He was growing older, but his intellect was bright as in youth, and his young wife attracted people of taste into their charming circle.