r, then, as we had dreaded, our poor little boy was struck
down. However, it has pleased God to spare him, and, after a long
struggle, he is safe from the disorder and almost restored to his
former health. But we are still under a sort of quarantine, for,
although people pretend to believe in vaccination, they avoid the
house as if the plague were in it, and stop their carriages at the
end of the village and send inquiries and cards, and in my mind they
are right. To say nothing of Reading, there have been above thirty
severe cases, after vaccination, in our immediate neighborhood, five
of them fatal. I had been inoculated after the old style, my maid
had had the small-pox the natural way and the only one who escaped
was a young girl who had been vaccinated three times, the last two
years ago. Forgive this long story; it was necessary to excuse my
most unthankful silence, and may serve as an illustration of the way
a disease, supposed to be all but exterminated, is making head again
in England.

Thank you a thousand and a thousand times for your most delightful
books. Mr. Whipple's Lectures are magnificent, and your own Boston
Book could not, I think, be beaten by a London Book, certainly not
approached by the collected works of any other British
city,--Edinburgh, for example.

Mr. Bennett is most grateful for your kindness, and Mrs. Browning
will be no less enchanted at the honor done her husband. It is most
creditable to America that they think more of our thoughtful poets
than the English do themselves.

Two female friends of mine--Mrs. Acton Tindal, a young beauty as
well as a woman of genius, and a Miss Julia Day, whom I have never
seen, but whose verses show extraordinary purity of thought,
feeling, and expression--have been putting forth books. Julia Day's
second series she has done me the honor to inscribe to me,
notwithstanding which I venture to say how very much I admire it,
and so I think would you. Henry Chorley is going to be a happy man.
All his life long he has been dying to have a play acted, and now he
has one coming out at the Surrey Theatre, over Blackfriars Bridge.
He lives much among fine people, and likes the notion of a Faubourg
audience. Perhaps he is right. I am not at all afraid of the play,
which is very beautiful,--a blank-verse comedy full of trut