ng Sketch with great pleasure and admiration.
Let me thank you for it heartily. As a beautiful suggestion of nature
associated with this country, it shall have a quiet place on the walls
of my house as long as I live.

Your reference to my dear friend Washington Irving renews the vivid
impressions reawakened in my mind at Baltimore the other day. I saw his
fine face for the last time in that city. He came there from New York to
pass a day or two with me before I went westward, and they were made
among the most memorable of my life by his delightful fancy and genial
humour. Some unknown admirer of his books and mine sent to the hotel a
most enormous mint julep, wreathed with flowers. We sat, one on either
side of it, with great solemnity (it filled a respectable-sized paper),
but the solemnity was of very short duration. It was quite an enchanted
julep, and carried us among innumerable people and places that we both
knew. The julep held out far into the night, and my memory never saw him
afterward otherwise than as bending over it, with his straw, with an
attempted gravity (after some anecdote, involving some wonderfully droll
and delicate observation of character), and then, as his eyes caught
mine, melting into that captivating laugh of his which was the brightest
and best I have ever heard.

Dear Sir, with many thanks, faithfully yours.

[Sidenote: Mrs. Pease.]

BALTIMORE, _9th February, 1868._

DEAR MADAM,

Mr. Dolby has _not_ come between us, and I have received your letter. My
answer to it is, unfortunately, brief. I am not coming to Cleveland or
near it. Every evening on which I can possibly read during the remainder
of my stay in the States is arranged for, and the fates divide me from
"the big woman with two smaller ones in tow." So I send her my love (to
be shared in by the two smaller ones, if she approve--but not
otherwise), and seriously assure her that her pleasant letter has been
most welcome.

Dear madam, faithfully your friend.

[Sidenote: Mr. James T. Fields.]

ABOARD THE "RUSSIA," BOUND FOR LIVERPOOL,
_Sunday, 26th April, 1868._

MY DEAR FIELDS,

In order that you may have the earliest intelligence of me, I begin this
note to-day in my small cabin, purposing (if it should prove
practicable) to post it at Queenstown for the return