were
in seeing me do my duty by that flowery julep (in what I dreamily
apprehend to have been a former state of existence) at Baltimore.

Will you let me present to you a cousin of mine, Mr. B----, who is
associated with a merchant's house in New York? Of course he wants to
see you, and know you. How can _I_ wonder at that? How can anybody?

I had a long talk with Leslie at the last Academy dinner (having
previously been with him in Paris), and he told me that you were
flourishing. I suppose you know that he wears a moustache--so do I for
the matter of that, and a beard too--and that he looks like a portrait
of Don Quixote.

Holland House has four-and-twenty youthful pages in it now--twelve for
my lord, and twelve for my lady; and no clergyman coils his leg up under
his chair all dinner-time, and begins to uncurve it when the hostess
goes. No wheeled chair runs smoothly in with that beaming face in it;
and ----'s little cotton pocket-handkerchief helped to make (I believe)
this very sheet of paper. A half-sad, half-ludicrous story of Rogers is
all I will sully it with. You know, I daresay, that for a year or so
before his death he wandered, and lost himself like one of the Children
in the Wood, grown up there and grown down again. He had Mrs. Procter
and Mrs. Carlyle to breakfast with him one morning--only those two. Both
excessively talkative, very quick and clever, and bent on entertaining
him. When Mrs. Carlyle had flashed and shone before him for about
three-quarters of an hour on one subject, he turned his poor old eyes on
Mrs. Procter, and pointing to the brilliant discourser with his poor old
finger, said (indignantly), "Who is _she_?" Upon this, Mrs. Procter,
cutting in, delivered (it is her own story) a neat oration on the life
and writings of Carlyle, and enlightened him in her happiest and airiest
manner; all of which he heard, staring in the dreariest silence, and
then said (indignantly, as before), "And who are _you_?"

Ever, my dear Irving,
Most affectionately and truly yours.

[Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A]

VILLE DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE,
_Wednesday, 9th July, 1856._

MY DEAR STONE,

I have got a capital part for you in the farce,[66] not a difficult one
to learn, as you never say anything but "Yes" and "No." You are called
in the _dramatis personae_ an able-bodied Britis