old sow figures is the very best thing I have seen lately. Its quiet
style resembles Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World," and "Don Quixote,"
--which are my beau ideals of fine writing.

You have paid the preacher! Well, that is good, also. What a man wants
with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.

Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully
beautiful painting which this city has ever seen--Church's "Heart of the
Andes"--which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all
the bloom and glory of a tropical summer--dotted with birds and flowers
of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners,
and twilight groves, and cool cascades--all grandly set off with a
majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in
everlasting ice and snow! I have seen it several times, but it is always
a new picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time which
you saw the first. We took the opera glass, and examined its beauties
minutely, for the naked eye cannot discern the little wayside flowers,
and soft shadows and patches of sunshine, and half-hidden bunches of
grass and jets of water which form some of its most enchanting features.
There is no slurring of perspective effect about it--the most distant
--the minutest object in it has a marked and distinct personality--so that
you may count the very leaves on the trees. When you first see the tame,
ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon
it, and say "Humbug"--but your third visit will find your brain gasping
and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in--and
appreciate it in its fulness--and understand how such a miracle could
have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands. You
will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections
--your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something--you hardly know what