e correspondence. Here is the first letter, time-stained, but
preserved with religious care.

Fuller's Hotel, Washington, Monday, March 14, 1842.

My Dear Felton: I was more delighted than I can possibly tell you to
receive (last Saturday night) your welcome letter. We and the
oysters missed you terribly in New York. You carried away with you
more than half the delight and pleasure of my New World; and I
heartily wish you could bring it back again.

There are very interesting men in this place,--highly interesting,
of course,--but it's not a comfortable place; is it? If spittle
could wait at table we should be nobly attended, but as that
property has not been imparted to it in the present state of
mechanical science, we are rather lonely and orphan-like, in respect
of "being looked arter." A blithe black was introduced on our
arrival, as our peculiar and especial attendant. He is the only
gentleman in the town who has a peculiar delicacy in intruding upon
my valuable time. It usually takes seven rings and a threatening
message from ---- to produce him; and when he comes he goes to fetch
something, and, forgetting it by the way, comes back no more.

We have been in great distress, really in distress, at the
non-arrival of the Caledonia. You may conceive what our joy was,
when, while we were dining out yesterday, H. arrived with the joyful
intelligence of her safety. The very news of her having really
arrived seemed to diminish the distance between ourselves and home,
by one half at least.

And this morning (though we have not yet received our heap of
despatches, for which we are looking eagerly forward to this night's
mail),--this morning there reached us unexpectedly, through the
government bag (Heaven knows how they came there), two of our many
and long-looked-for letters, wherein was a circumstantial account of
the whole conduct and behavior of our pets; with marvellous
narrations of Charley's precocity at a Twelfth Night juvenile party
at Macready's; and tremendous predictions of the governess, dimly
suggesting his having got out of pot-hooks and hangers, and darkly
insinuating the possibility of his writing us a letter before long;
and many other workings of the same prophetic spirit, in reference
to him and his sisters, very gladdening to their mother's heart, and
not