little journey (to Chicago) is fifteen hundred
miles on end, by railway, and back again!

We have an excellent gasman, who is well up to that department. We have
enlarged the large staff by another clerk, yet even now the preparation
of such an immense number of new tickets constantly, and the keeping and
checking of the accounts, keep them hard at it. And they get so oddly
divided! Kelly is at Philadelphia, another man at Baltimore, two others
are stamping tickets at the top of this house, another is cruising over
New England, and Osgood will come on duty to-morrow (when Dolby starts
off) to pick me up after the reading, and take me to the hotel, and
mount guard over me, and bring me back here. You see that even such
wretched domesticity as Dolby and self by a fireside is broken up under
these conditions.

Dolby has been twice poisoned, and Osgood once. Morgan's sharpness has
discovered the cause. When the snow is deep upon the ground, and the
partridges cannot get their usual food, they eat something (I don't know
what, if anybody does) which does not poison _them_, but which poisons
the people who eat them. The symptoms, which last some twelve hours, are
violent sickness, cold perspiration, and the formation of some
detestable mucus in the stomach. You may infer that partridges have been
banished from our bill of fare. The appearance of our sufferers was
lamentable in the extreme.

Did I tell you that the severity of the weather, and the heat of the
intolerable furnaces, dry the hair and break the nails of strangers?
There is not a complete nail in the whole British suite, and my hair
cracks again when I brush it. (I am losing my hair with great rapidity,
and what I don't lose is getting very grey.)

The _Cuba_ will bring this. She has a jolly new captain--Moody, of the
_Java_--and her people rushed into the reading, the other night,
captain-headed, as if I were their peculiar property. Please God I shall
come home in her, in my old cabin; leaving here on the 22nd of April,
and finishing my eighty-fourth reading on the previous night! It is
likely enough that I shall read and go straight on board.

I think this is all my poor stock of intelligence. By-the-bye, on the
last Sunday in the old year, I lost my old year's pocket-book, "which,"
as Mr. Pepys would add, "do trouble me mightily." Give me Katie's new
address; I haven't got it.

[Sidenote: Miss Dickens.]

PHILADELPHIA, _Mo