ery glad to hear of your safe arrival
in New York, and hope that long before this reaches your hand you will
have found poor Leather and got him to some place of comfort, where he
may recover the health that we have been given to understand he has
lost.

"I chanced to be down at Sealford visiting your mother when your
letter arrived; hence my knowledge of its contents. Mrs Leather and
her daughter May were then as _usual_. By the way, what a pretty girl
May has become! I remember her such a rumpled up, dress-anyhow,
harum-scarum sort of a girl, that I find it hard to believe the tall,
graceful, modest creature I meet with now is the same person! Captain
Stride says she is the finest craft he ever saw, except that wonderful
`Maggie,' about whose opinions and sayings he tells us so much.

"But this is a double digression. To return: your letter of course
gave us all great pleasure. It also gave your mother and May some
anxiety, where it tells of the necessity of your going up to that
wild-west place, Traitor's Trap, where poor Leather is laid up. Take
care of yourself, my dear boy, for I'm told that the red savages are
still given to those roasting, scalping, and other torturing that one
has read of in the pages of Fenimore Cooper.

"By the way, before I forget it, let me say, in reference to the
enclosed bill, it is a loan which I have obtained for Leather, at very
moderate interest, and when more is required more can be obtained on
the same terms. Let him understand this, for I don't wish that he
should think, on the one hand, that he is drawing on his mother's
slender resources, or, on the other hand, that he is under obligation
to any one. I send the bill because I feel quite sure that you
started on this expedition with too little. It is drawn in your name,
and I think you will be able to cash it at any civilised town--even in
the far west!

"Talking of Captain Stride--was I talking of him? Well, no matter.
As he is past work now, but thinks himself very far indeed from that
condition, I have prevailed on him to accept a new and peculiar post
arising out of the curious evolutions of the firm of Withers and
Company which satisfies the firm completely and suits the captain to a
T. As the work can be done anywhere, a residence has been taken for
him in Sealford, mid-way between that of your mother and Mrs Leather,
so that he and hi