part to
speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden
letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate
the yearning for sympathy which I felt. You who were among people
grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each
other's necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their
eyes and triumph in their hearts, can picture my isolation.

"I have never faltered in my faith, and in the darkest hours, when
misfortunes seemed thronging most thickly upon us, I have never felt
the want of anything to lean against; but I own I did feel like
shaking hands with a few hundred people when I heard of our Fourth
of July, 1863, work, and should like to have heard and joined in an
American cheer or two.

"I have not much to say of matters here to interest you. We have
had an intensely hot, historically hot, and very long and very dry
summer. I never knew before what a drought meant. In Hungary the
suffering is great, and the people are killing the sheep to feed the
pigs with the mutton. Here about Vienna the trees have been almost
stripped of foliage ever since the end of August. There is no glory
in the grass nor verdure in anything.

"In fact, we have nothing green here but the Archduke Max, who
firmly believes that he is going forth to Mexico to establish an
American empire, and that it is his divine mission to destroy the
dragon of democracy and reestablish the true Church, the Right
Divine, and all sorts of games. Poor young man! . . .

"Our information from home is to the 12th. Charleston seems to be
in 'articulo mortis,' but how forts nowadays seem to fly in the face
of Scripture. Those founded on a rock, and built of it, fall easily
enough under the rain of Parrotts and Dahlgrens, while the house
built of sand seems to bid defiance to the storm."

In quoting from these confidential letters I have been restrained from
doing full justice to their writer by the fact that he spoke with such
entire freedom of persons as well as events. But if they could be read
from beginning to end, no one could help feeling that his love for his
own country, and passionate absorption of every thought in the strife
upon which its existence as a nation depended, were his very life during
all this agonizing period. He can think and talk of nothing else, or, if
he turns for a moment to other s