You ask whether I read our papers and the news from Europe. No, except just so far as to keep abreast of the bare facts. You know how I hate details of battlefields, and that I have never got over my intense dislike to the glowing and semi-scientific descriptions of “our own correspondents,” sitting down in the midst of dying and agonised men to do their penny or guinea a line. The dry report of a general or staff officer, whose sad duty it is to be there, I follow with the deepest interest, and recognise a battlefield as one of the very noblest places from which a true man may make a “bee-line track” to heaven. The noblest death in our times was Robert Shaw’s at the attack on Fort Wagner, at the head of his niggers, under whom he was buried; but, for all that, war and its details are a ghastly and horrible evil, which the faith of our Master is going yet to root out of this silly old world, and which none of His servants should touch unless it is the clear path of supreme duty. I pity the poor French, utterly unmanned as they seem to be by this nineteen years of the rule of Mammon, and heartily wish they could find their manhood again, though I see no glimmer of it yet. Trochu seems a fine fellow, and I can’t help believing that many of my acquaintance and the members of the Paris associations, will be found ready to die like men on the walls of the city if they get a chance. By the way, where is N------? I wonder if he has gone back? If so, there is another brave and true man in Paris, and perhaps ten may save it. But I must be getting back to my journal or I shall be dropping stitches. If I don’t forget, my last brought you with us to Willard’s Hotel, Washington, a great three-hundred-roomed hotel, mixed, if not of Southern proclivities during the war, before the door of which more than one duel was fought in those searching times. At breakfast we found ourselves next the Wards, father and son, G. B------‘s friends, to whom I had given some letters. I found they had been even farther west than we; in fact, up to Denver City, in the bosom of the Rocky Mountains, and had also managed to get into four or five Southern states; but they had done it at the sacrifice not only of comfort but of the chance of seeing the home-life of the Americans, and I value the latter infinitely higher than mere sight-seeing, so do not regret the least that we didn’t get through the extra 1500 miles, which at the cost of five days’ more travel would have let us see the Rocky Mountains and shoot at buffaloes.