I saw this morning the captain of a sloop-of-war who has been visiting
various ports in the Adriatic. He was received at Ancona with a
_furore_ of enthusiasm, and exceedingly well treated at Venice,
Trieste, &c., by the Austrians, who are burning to revenge themselves
on the French, and anxious to ally themselves with us for that
purpose.... We have been steaming through a narrow channel, with the
snow-covered mountains of Albania on our right; but we are now
emerging into the open Adriatic.

[Sidenote: England.]

By Trieste and Vienna he travelled rapidly to Paris, where he was met by
Lady Elgin; and on the 11th of April 1861, within a few days of the
anniversary of his departure, he found himself once more on British soil.

[Sidenote: Warm reception.]
[Sidenote: Dunfermline.]

The reception which awaited him at home was even warmer than that which he
had met with two years before. What gratified him, perhaps, more than any
of the many similar expressions of good-will was the cordial welcome with
which he was greeted by his old friends and neighbours at Dunfermline:
friends from whom he had been, as he told them, so long an unwilling
absentee. His answer to their address was the simple and natural expression
of this feeling.

It is pleasant (he said)--perhaps it is one of the sweetest flowers we
cull on the path of this rugged life--to find ourselves among old
friends after a long absence, and to find their hearts beat as true
and warm as ever. I am deeply gratified by the flattering terms in
which my public services have been referred to in this address, but I
am still more gratified by the welcome which you have tendered to me
to-day.... Gentlemen, I have been for many years very much, perhaps
too much of a wanderer, and it has been my fortune to receive from our
countrymen established in different parts of the world tokens of their
regard and consideration. The very last address of felicitation I
received before I landed at Dover the other day was from a body of my
countrymen established in the Philippines--a group of Spanish islands
in the far East, near the equator. But allow me to say that among all
these tokens, those most grateful and agreeable to me are those which
I receive from friends and neighbours at home. And, perhaps, I
appreciate these tokens the more highly, because I am conscious that
the very fact of