too, too low to answer it. One day so weak as to be
obliged with my hand to wave Mrs. Furguson away (another
lady obtained admittance), lest in the effort to converse I
might find another home. My hand and head are exhausted.

Most truly yours,

E. H. HOLLY.

CHAPTER XII

SOJOURN IN CHINA AND RETURN

Prior to the Civil War, Mr. Gouverneur received an appointment from
James Buchanan as U.S. Consul to Foo Chow in China, and I decided to
accompany him upon his long journey. Meanwhile a second daughter had
been added to our family, much to the disappointment of the large circle
of relatives who were still anxiously expecting me to hand down the name
of Gouverneur. We named her Ruth Monroe. We took passage upon the
clipper ship _Indiaman_, a vessel of heavy tonnage sailing from New York
and commanded by a "down-east" skipper named Smith. No railroads crossed
the American continent in those days, and the voyage to the far East had
to be made either around Cape Horn or by way of the Isthmus of Panama or
around the Cape of Good Hope. We selected the latter route, leaving New
York in October and arriving in Shanghai the following March. My
preparations for such a protracted journey with two very young children
were carefully and even elaborately planned but, to my dismay, some of
the most important articles of food for the childrens' diet became unfit
for use long before we reached our destination. As one may readily
imagine, I was accordingly put to my wits' end for substitutes. We also
provided ourselves with a goodly amount of literature, and more
particularly books relating to China, among which were Father Evariste
Regis Huc's volume on "The Chinese Empire," and Professor S. Wells
Williams's work on "The Middle Kingdom." We read these _en route_ with
great interest but discovered after a few months' residence in the East
that no book or pen we then knew conveyed an adequate idea of that
remarkable country.

We had a very favorable voyage, and sailing in the trade winds in the
Southern hemisphere was to me the very acme of bliss. I was thoroughly
in sympathy with the passage of Humboldt where he speaks of the tropical
skies and vegetation in the following beautiful manner:--"He on whom the
Southern Cross has never gleamed nor the Centaur frowned, above whom the
clouds of Magellan have never circled, who has never stood within the
shadow of great palms, nor clothed himse