guilty. I am afraid that incautious observation was the nuance of the
shadow of an intimation of an opinion, bearing the faintest adumbration
of a prediction: I am sorry for it. I am very sorry. I ought to have
kept my lips shut. I ought to have put sealing-wax upon them the moment
I got up. I won't,--I won't speak one word again.

Yours, wet or dry,

O. D

To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.

ST. DAVID'S, July 27, 1868.

FRIEND BRYANT,--I am a Quaker. I have just joined the sect. Thee won't
believe it, because thee will think I lack the calmness and staidness
that fit me for it. But I am a Quaker of the Isaac T. Hopper sort;
though, alas! here the resemblance fails also, for I do no good. Dear
me! I wish sometimes that I could have been one of the one-sided men;
it is so easy to run in one groove! and it 's all the fashion in these
days. But, avaunt expediency! Let me stick to my principles, and be a
rounded mediocrity, pelted on every hand, and pleasing [302] nobody. By
the bye, Mrs. Gibbons [Mrs. James Gibbons of New York, daughter of
Isaac T. Hopper] I has just sent me a fine medallion of her, father,
beautifully mounted. It is a remarkable face, for its massive strength
and the fun that is lurking in it. Hopper might have been a great man in
any other walk,--the statesman's, the lawyer's; he was, in his own.

. . . I want to say something, through the "Post," of the abominable
nuisance of the railroad whistle. I wrote once while you were gone, and
Nordhoff (how do you spell him?) did n't publish my letter, but only
introduced some of it in a paragraph of his own. If I write again, I
shall want your imprimatur. This horrible shriek, which tears all our
nerves to pieces, and the nerves of all the land, except Cummington and
such lovely retirements, is altogether unnecessary; a lower tone would
answer just as well. It does on the Hudson River Road.

To his Daughters.

ST. DAVID'S, Oct. 15, 1868.

. . . YOUR letter came yesterday, and was very satisfactory in the
upshot; that is, you got there. But, pest on railroad cars I they are
mere torture-chambers, with the additional chance, as Johnson said of
the ship, of being land-wrecked. Some people like 'em, though. And there
are dangers everywhere. The other day-a high windy day--a party went to
the mountain, and had like to have been blown off from the top. But
they said it was beautiful. I don't doubt, if the whole bunch had been
tumbled over and rolled down to th