as he considered the most rare and interesting.  He is not only active in body, but he retains all the faculties of his mind.  He appears to have a very happy disposition.  While I was with him a continual smile was on his face, and it seemed to give him great pleasure to show me his books.  He has been engaged in collecting them for over fifty years, and they have cost him a sum equal to three hundred thousand dollars, exclusive of a great many presents.  The first book on music was printed in 1480.”  At Trieste he spent some time with the United States consul there, Mr. Thayer, of Boston, best known to musical and literary people as the author of an exhaustive Life of Beethoven, which has been under way for nearly thirty years and is not yet finished.  Mr. Thayer showed his visitor all the historic data and personal relics which he had collected for the book, of which at that date only one volume had been published.  Since then Mercadante and F?s have been gathered to their fathers.  Their genial guest is also gone.  The industrious Mr. Thayer lives, with three volumes of the Life completed, and every American, either literary or musical, will wish him well on to the conclusion of his magnum opus.

Mr. Mickley’s plain personal habits remained almost unchanged by the many unforeseen exigencies of foreign travel.  Once, at Rouen, six months after leaving home, he says, “Tasted wine for the first time in Europe, as the water here did not agree with me.”  A little later, at Munich, he remarks, “Drank beer for the first time.”  His pockets remained as accessible as heretofore to the nimble-fingered gentry.  Upon his first visit to Naples, he records very naively, “Three silk handkerchiefs have been stolen from me here,—­which is one more than in London.”  At Jaffa, on his way from Egypt to Palestine, besides the robbery of coins alluded to some time back, he lost a choice autograph manuscript of Mozart which had cost him two hundred and fifty francs at Salzburg.  If careless in these particulars, he was very watchful and jealous of opportunities to uphold America’s position in the world.  He took special pains to inform the mint-masters at various points concerning the superior appliances and machinery of the Philadelphia Mint.  On the way back from Lapland, while steaming southward along the upper waters of the Gulf of Bothnia, he writes, under date of July 4, 1871, “This being our national holiday, I put up my flag on the door of my berth, but was obliged to explain the meaning of the holiday to nearly all the passengers.”  While in England, he met at Manchester a barrister who had formerly been his guest in Philadelphia.  This gentleman proposed to introduce him to an American lawyer then practising there.  “I asked the name.  He said it was Judah P. Benjamin.  I declined the invitation.”