“No Thoroughfare” is very shortly coming out in Paris, where it is now in active rehearsal.  It is still playing here, but without Fechter, who has been very ill.  The doctor’s dismissal of him to Paris, however, and his getting better there, enables him to get up the play there.  He and Wilkie missed so many pieces of stage effect here, that, unless I am quite satisfied with his report, I shall go over and try my stage-managerial hand at the Vaudeville Theatre.  I particularly want the drugging and attempted robbing in the bedroom scene at the Swiss inn to be done to the sound of a waterfall rising and falling with the wind.  Although in the very opening of that scene they speak of the waterfall and listen to it, nobody thought of its mysterious music.  I could make it, with a good stage carpenter, in an hour.  Is it not a curious thing that they want to make me a governor of the Foundling Hospital, because, since the Christmas number, they have had such an amazing access of visitors and money?

    My dear love to Fields once again.  Same to you and him from M——­
    and G——.  I cannot tell you both how I miss you, or how overjoyed I
    should be to see you here.

    Ever, my dear ——­, your most affectionate friend,

    C.D.

Excellent accounts of his health and spirits continued to come from Gad’s Hill, and his letters were full of plans for the future.  On the 7th of July he writes from Gad’s Hill as usual:—­

    Gad’s Hill Place, Tuesday, 7th July, 1868.

My Dear Fields:  I have delayed writing to you (and ——­, to whom my love) until I should have seen Longfellow.  When he was in London the first time he came and went without reporting himself, and left me in a state of unspeakable discomfiture.  Indeed, I should not have believed in his having been here at all, if Mrs. Procter had not told me of his calling to see Procter.  However, on his return he wrote to me from the Langham Hotel, and I went up to town to see him, and to make an appointment for his coming here.  He, the girls, and ——­ came down last Saturday night, and stayed until Monday forenoon.  I showed them all the neighboring country that could be shown in so short a time, and they finished off with a tour of inspection of the kitchens, pantry, wine-cellar, pickles, sauces, servants’ sitting-room, general household stores, and even the Cellar Book, of this illustrious establishment.  Forster and Kent (the latter wrote certain verses to Longfellow, which have been published in the “Times,” and which I sent to D——­) came down for a day, and I hope we all had a really “good time.”  I turned out a couple of postilions in the old red jacket of the old red royal Dover road, for our ride; and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago.  Of course we went to look at the old houses in Rochester, and the old cathedral, and the old castle, and the house for the six poor travellers who, “not being rogues or proctors,