. . .  “When you wrote me last you said on general matters this:  ’In a few days we shall get the news of the success or failure of the attacks on Port Hudson and Vicksburg.  If both are successful, many will say that the whole matter is about settled.’  You may suppose that when I got the great news I shook hands warmly with you in the spirit across the Atlantic.  Day by day for so long we had been hoping to hear the fall of Vicksburg.  At last when that little concentrated telegram came, announcing Vicksburg and Gettysburg on the same day and in two lines, I found myself almost alone. . . .  There was nobody in the house to join in my huzzahs but my youngest infant.  And my conduct very much resembled that of the excellent Philip II. when he heard the fall of Antwerp,—­for I went to her door, screeching through the key-hole ‘Vicksburg is ours!’ just as that other ‘pere de famille,’ more potent, but I trust not more respectable than I, conveyed the news to his Infanta. (Fide, for the incident, an American work on the Netherlands, i. p. 263, and the authorities there cited.) It is contemptible on my part to speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate the yearning for sympathy which I felt.  You who were among people grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each other’s necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their eyes and triumph in their hearts, can picture my isolation.

“I have never faltered in my faith, and in the darkest hours, when misfortunes seemed thronging most thickly upon us, I have never felt the want of anything to lean against; but I own I did feel like shaking hands with a few hundred people when I heard of our Fourth of July, 1863, work, and should like to have heard and joined in an American cheer or two.

“I have not much to say of matters here to interest you.  We have had an intensely hot, historically hot, and very long and very dry summer.  I never knew before what a drought meant.  In Hungary the suffering is great, and the people are killing the sheep to feed the pigs with the mutton.  Here about Vienna the trees have been almost stripped of foliage ever since the end of August.  There is no glory in the grass nor verdure in anything.

“In fact, we have nothing green here but the Archduke Max, who firmly believes that he is going forth to Mexico to establish an American empire, and that it is his divine mission to destroy the dragon of democracy and reestablish the true Church, the Right Divine, and all sorts of games.  Poor young man! . . .

“Our information from home is to the 12th.  Charleston seems to be in ‘articulo mortis,’ but how forts nowadays seem to fly in the face of Scripture.  Those founded on a rock, and built of it, fall easily enough under the rain of Parrotts and Dahlgrens, while the