“The sight of such a crowd is fearful, and its movements, as it was swayed by the incidents of the moment, were in the highest degree exciting.  A body of troops of the line would pass; the crowd would silently open for their passage and close immediately behind them.  A body of the National Guard would succeed, and these would be received with loud cheers and gratulations.  A soldier on guard would exercise a little more severity than was, perhaps, necessary for the occasion; yells, and execrations, and hisses would be his reward.

“Night had now set in; heavy, dark clouds, with a misty rain, had made the heavens above more dark and gloomy.  A man rushed forward toward the gate, hurling his hat in the air, and followed by the crowd, which suddenly formed into long lines behind him.  I now looked for something serious.  A body of troops was in line before the gate.  At this moment two police officers, on horseback, in citizens’ dress, but with a tricolored belt around their bodies, rode through the crowd and up to the gate, and in a moment after I perceived the multitude from one of the streets rushing in wild confusion into the boulevard, and the current of the people setting back in all directions.

“While wondering at the cause of this sudden movement, I heard the trampling of horses, and a large band of carabiniers, with their bright helmets glittering in the light of the lamps, dashed down the street and drew up before the gate.  The police officers put themselves at their head and harangued the people.  The address was received with groans.  The carabiniers drew their swords, orders were given for the charge, and in an instant they dashed down the street, the people dispersing like the mist before the wind.  The charge was made down the opposite sidewalk from that where we had placed ourselves, so I kept my station, and, when they returned up the middle of the street to charge on the other side, I crossed over behind them and avoided them.”

I have given enough of this letter to show that Morse was still surrounded by dangers of various sorts, and it is also a good pen-picture of the irresponsible actions of a cowardly mob, especially of a Parisian mob.

The letters which passed between Morse and his friends, James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist, and Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, are most interesting, and would of themselves fill a volume.  Both Cooper and Greenough wrote fluently and entertainingly, and I shall select a few characteristic sentences from the letters of each, resisting the strong temptation to include the whole correspondence.

Greenough returned to Florence after having roomed with Morse in Paris, and wrote as follows from there:—­

As for the commission from Government, I don’t speak of it yet.  After about a fortnight I shall be calm, I think.  Morse, I have made up my mind on one score, namely, that this order shall not be fruitless to the greater men who are now in our rear.  They are sucking now and rocking in cradles, but I can hear the pung! pung! puffetty! of their hammers, and I am prophetic, too.  We’ll see if Yankee land can’t muster some ten or a dozen of them in the course of as many years...