from the thickness of the walls, looking like deep recesses.  In the window that looked upon the farm-yards was the General’s writing-table and seat.  A spy-glass lay within reach, enabling him to overlook the yard-work without rising from his chair; and on the table were his farm-books, with the record of crops and improvements entered in regular order with his own hand.  Charles Sumner, who visited La Grange last summer, tells me that they lie there still.

The library was miscellaneous, many of the books being presentation-copies, and most of them neatly bound.  Its predominant character, as nearly as I can recollect, was historical; the history in which he had borne so important a part naturally coming in for a full share.  Though not a scholar from choice, General Lafayette loved books, and was well read.  His Latin had stood him in stead at Olmuetz for his brief communication with his surgeon; and I have a distinct impression, though I cannot vouch for the correctness of it, that he never dropped it altogether.  His associations were too much among men of thought as well as men of action, and the responsibilities that weighed upon him were too grave, to permit so conscientious a man to neglect the aid of books.  Of the historians of our Revolution, he preferred Ramsay, who had, as he said, put everything into his two volumes, and abridged as well as Eutropius.  It was, perhaps, the presence of something of the same quality that led him to give the preference, among the numerous histories of the French Revolution, to Mignet, though, in putting him into my hands, he cautioned me against that dangerous spirit of fatalism, which, making man the unconscious instrument of an irresistible necessity, leaves him no real responsibility for evil or for good.

It was in this room that he passed the greater part of the time that was not given to his farm or his guests.  I never entered it without finding him at his desk, with his pen or a book in hand.  His correspondence was so extensive that he was always obliged to keep a secretary, though a large portion of his letters were written with his own hand.  He wrote rapidly in fact, though not rapidly to the eye; and you were surprised, in seeing his hand move over the paper, to find how soon it reached the bottom of the sheet, and how closely it filled it up.  His handwriting was clear and distinct, neither decidedly French nor decidedly English,—­like all his habits and opinions, formed early and never changed.  I have letters of his to my grandfather, written during the Revolution, and letters of his to myself, written fifty years after it, in which it is almost impossible to trace the difference between the old man and the young one.  English he seemed to write as readily as French, although a strong Gallicism would every now and then slip from his pen, as it slipped from his tongue.  “I had to learn in a hurry,” said he, giving me one day the history of his English studies.  “I began on my passage out, as