The katydids are making delightful music in the trees, and the summer lightning is playing over the Western heaven; while a gentle breeze, cool and refreshing as if it came straight off a Western sea, is just lifting, every now and then, the corner of my paper. Were I young again,--but as I am not likely to be that, I refrain from bootless castle-building, and shall turn in, leaving windows wide open for the katydid’s chirp and the divine breeze to enter freely, and wishing as good rest as they have all so well earned to my crowded neighbours in this enchanted solitude. Rugby, Tennessee, 10th September 1880. I take it I must have “written you frequent” (as they say here), at this time of year, in the last quarter-century on this theme, but, if you let me, should like to go back once more on the old lines. “Loafing as she should be taken” is likely, I fear, to become a lost art, though to my generation it is the one luxury. A country without good loafing-places is no longer a country for a self-respecting man in his second half-century. The rapid deterioration of our poor dear old England in this respect fills me with forebodings far more than the Irish Question, which we shall worry through on the lines so staunchly advocated by you. No fear of that, to my thinking; but, alas! great fear of our losing the power and the means of loafing. Time was when John Bull, in his own isle, was the best loafer in Christendom--(I may say in the world, the Turk and Otaheitan loafer doing nothing else, and he who does nothing but loaf loses the whole flavour of it)--and I can remember the time when at the seaside--for instance, Cromer, and inland, Betwys-y-Coed, Penygurd, and the like--the true loafer might be happy, gleaning “the harvest of a quiet eye,” and far from any one who wanted to go anywhere or do anything in particular. The railway has come to Cromer, and I hear that the guardian phalanx of Buxtons, Hoares, Gurneys, and Barclays, all good loafers in the last generation, have thrown up the sponge and gone with the stream. I was at Betwys and Penygurd last year, and at the former there were three or four long pleasure-vans meeting every train; at the latter, three parties came in, in a few hours, to do Snowdon and get back to dinner at Capel Curig or Bethgellert. Indeed, I was sore to mark that even Henry Owen, landlord and guide, once a good loafer, has succumbed., Over here it is still worse in the Atlantic States; but this is a big country, in which oases _must_ be left yet for many a long year for the loafer, of which this is one. It lies on a mountain plateau, seven miles from the station, to which a hack goes twice daily to meet the morning and evening mails (once too often, perhaps, for the highest enjoyment of the loafer); but otherwise the outer world, its fidgets and its businesses, no more concern us than they did Cooper’s jackdaw. I am conscious that regular work here must be done by some one, as daily meals at 7 A.M., and