There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not charm, a weary soul, and such a vacant hour there was on this same Friday evening.  The “opera-house” was spacious and admirably ventilated.  As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window a bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes.  It was a strange intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces.  I called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but “Bones” was irresistibly droll, and Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed uncared-for down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York.  Mr. Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious look on his face which implied that he knew how to do me a service and meant to do it.  Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found a couch spread for the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York with no visits, but those of civility, from the conductor.  The best thing I saw on the route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite sure.  There was more genius in it than in any structure of the kind I have ever seen,—­each length being of a special pattern, ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown.  I trust some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to go with the view of the spires of Frederick, already referred to, as mementos of my journey.

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed people whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at some time or other.  Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, forming a group by themselves.  Presently one addressed me by name, and, on inquiry, I found him to be the gentleman who was with me in the pulpit as Orator on the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem, one delivered at New Haven.  The party were very courteous and friendly, and contributed in various ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people in the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes and then before them, like the “army” in a beggarly stage-show.  Suppose that I should really wish; some time or other, to get away from this everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries, where should I buy a ticket the like of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat to which some one of them was not a neighbor.

A little less than a year before, after the Ball’s Bluff accident, the Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night on our homeward journey at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged on the ground-floor, and fared sumptuously.  We were not so peculiarly fortunate this time, the house being really very full.  Farther from the flowers and nearer to the stars,—­to reach the neighborhood of which last the per ardua of three or four flights of stairs was formidable for any mortal, wounded or well.