n spirit.

My visit there was during the most fervid heat of the summer solstice,
when through the sultry days all living creatures are panting and
breathless, yet withal the stay of three weeks' duration passed away with
delightful rapidity, and time stole upon us and stole from us almost
imperceptibly.

Leaving Richmond for White Sulphur Springs, I stopped at all important
intervening points. At Staunton I devoted an entire day to the inspection
of the Institution for the Blind, and in pleasant acceptance of
hospitalities dispensed both by inmates and officials.

Arriving at White Sulphur after dark, we found the mountain air so cold
that we could almost imagine ourselves suddenly transported from the
Equator to the Pole, and were as thoroughly chilled as one unacclimated
would be from so great and sudden a transition.

The mammoth hotel of this watering place, comfortably seated in its
dining-hall twelve hundred guests, and all its appointments were in
equally grand proportion. We occupied, from choice, one of the cozy little
cottages, nestling like a dove-cot in some bowery shade, with its patch of
green-sward and flower-garden in front and purling brook behind, holding
the double charm of rural simplicity and home-like air. Hattie led me
through every path and grove, nook and glen of this sweet seclusion, this
valley embosomed in mountains, and my thoughts reverted to the days when
the belles and beaux of our American court sought these sylvan shades;
when Washington and the successive Chief Magistrates of the Great Republic
had gracefully glided through the stately minuet and invested this spot
with a now classic interest.

Prominent among the visitors was the leonine General Lee, a Colossus in
person and in mind. In spirit brave as a true hero, but in manner gentle
as a woman. In the sweet solace of sympathy his heart went out to the
blind girl, and assumed the tangible form of solid favors, for by his
personal efforts under the magic influence and royal mandate of his
imperial power many a little volume was appropriated that would have been
otherwise unnoticed.

George Peabody was also a guest, but in this, his last visit to his native
country, he was too ill and prostrate to receive friends. I felt for him a
strong personal sympathy for his beneficence to my native city, to which
he ever acknowledged himself indebted for his first business success; and
in which the pure, white marble structure, with its m