It is a curious experience, and one well worth trying, this ten days’ voyage. When you go on board at Liverpool, and look round at the first dinner, there are probably not half a dozen faces you ever saw before. By the time you walk out of the ship, bag in hand, on to the New York landing-place, there are scarcely half a dozen with» whom you have not a pleasant speaking acquaintance; while with a not inconsiderable number you feel (unless you have had singularly bad luck) as if you must have known them intimately for years, without having been aware of it. As you touch the land, the express men and hotel touts rush on you, and the spell is broken. The little society resolves itself at their touch into separate atoms, which are whirled away, without time to wish one another God-speed, into the turbulent ocean of New York life, never again to be gathered together as a society in this world, for worship, for food, or fun. “The present life of man, 0 king!” said a Saxon thane in Edwin’s Witenagemot, when they were consulting whether Augustine and his priests should be allowed to settle at Canterbury, “reminds me of one of your winter feasts where you sit with your thanes and counsellors. The hearth blazes in our midst, and a grateful heat is spread around, while storms of rain and snow are raging without. A little sparrow enters at one door and flies delighted around us, till it departs through the other. Such is the life of man, and we are as ignorant of the state which went before us as of that which will follow it. Things being so,” went on the thane, “I feel that if this new faith can give us more certainty, it deserves to be received,”--which last sentiment has, I allow, no bearing on the present subject, nor, perhaps you will say, has the rest of it. But somehow the old story came into my head so vividly as I was leaving the steamer, that I feel like tossing it on to your readers, to see what they can make of it; though I own, on looking at it again, I am not myself clear as to the interpretation, or whether I am the sparrow or the thane. New York is more overwhelming than ever,--surely the most tremendous human mill on this planet; but I must not begin upon it at the end of a letter. Life in Texas, Ranche on the Rio Grande, 16th September 1884.