f for pleasure. From
the Austrian territory I was to write to Kossuth all the political
information I could collect, the messages being conveyed in a
cryptograph in which the form of the letter was to be that of a
correspondence between lovers. The words composing the message were to
be written on spaces left in a mask of which each had a copy, and the
spaces between the words then filled up so that the letter would carry
some meaning when read as a whole. Love-letters were supposed to give
most room for nonsense. Knowing very little French, I bought a pocket
dictionary and a copy of Racine, and, during a ten days' stay in
Paris, by diligent use of the former in all my transactions, I picked
up enough for the needs of travel, and, spending all my leisure over
the latter, I was, before my mission was over, able to converse with
considerable fluency and knew my Racine thoroughly.

From Paris I made the journey to Brussels in the company of an
American gentleman, Mr. Coxe, of Alabama, traveling with his wife and
daughter. At Brussels I made, through the Coxes, the acquaintance
of M. Le Hardy de Beaulieu, the leader of a section of the Belgian
Liberals, whose father had held a command in the Belgian contingent at
Waterloo. My acquaintance with M. Le Hardy lasted many years, he being
much interested in America, and having, with his brother, founded
a Belgian colony in Alabama. The ancestral estate of the Le Hardys
included part of the field of Waterloo, and we visited it in company
with M. Le Hardy, who pointed out the trenches made by the heavy
artillery of Napoleon still distinguishable on the surface of the
fields in spite of the subsequent ploughings. I suppose that his
familiarity with the fields from his boyhood gives authority to his
assurance that the depressions we saw were the effect of the ploughing
of the guns in the wet, soft earth, and did not exist in the natural
lay of the land, and the incident brought one very near to the great
struggle which fixed for long the position of England in European
politics. M. Le Hardy had been, like his father before him, urged to
resume the title of nobility which the father had renounced in the
warmth of the republican movement prior to the Empire, having burned
the patent in the square at Brussels; but, like the father, he had
always refused. He was a consistent and, as he would now be classed, a
moderate republican.

Visiting Dusseldorf for the sake of the school of art t