talk with you on this theme, and of God's unspeakable goodness, his loving-kindnesses and tender mercies. I am feeling daily (for which I praise God) a stronger desire to live nearer to him, and to love him more, and to have others love him more. I have been much occupied through the winter, or I should have written you ere this. These are eventful times, and we have much work to do. My dear husband has been most indefatigable in his labors, and I am glad to say his efforts have not been in vain. I cannot tell you how thankful I have felt, as well as our dear church, that he was, through your kind efforts and those of other friends in England and Scotland, enabled to proclaim from his pulpit, to the vast audiences that have thronged to hear him, the messages of God in regard to our National Guilt. From our church it has spread over the land, as you have probably seen by the papers which I have occasionally sent you. His invitation to preach in the Hall of Representatives at Washington, the great crowds that gathered to hear him on the subject of Slavery, as also to the State Legislature of Pennsylvania, and of our own State, has been declared by the public journals to be one of the greatest triumphs of our day, and is, together with the President's Message to Congress to consider the subject of Emancipation, very encouraging. We begin now to feel very hopeful, and that the day is not very far distant when every yoke shall be broken and the oppressed set free. I was perfectly delighted with your photograph of Sherwood,-and how kind of you to send it-and I shall highly prize it. My faithful husband is quite in love with it. He encloses a little note of acknowledgment of your kindness, and is thankful for the willingness of the people all to hear the truth and sustain it.

And now, will our own people sustain it, and carry it forth in the education of their children of this generation in our own country? This is the great question, on the settlement of which our future destiny depends. We have reason to fear the establishment of a Constitutional despotism against the freedom of the teaching of God's Word from childhood for our own Government, and for the millions of immigrating foreign populations from nearly all nations crowding upon our shores and permitted the privilege of voting, often without being able to read our own language, or even to spell the names of those printed upon their votes, whom they are invited to set in office over us.

Letter to Dr. C. from Mr. Washburn.

MY VERY, VERY DEAR BROTHER:

WORCESTER, Jan, 13, 1859.

Dear Elizabeth and myself are running over with joy and gratitude, having just read your kind note to her under date of the 11th. It is really refreshing to be advised of such a demonstration as your people have made in your behalf as the fearless advocate of a whole gospel. I am quite certain that it will not only cheer and strengthen your heart, but it will tell on the interests of the cause as nothing else could at this time, when so many throughout the land are desiring and predicting your failure to maintain the high and glorious position which you so nobly sustained in the advocacy of a free pulpit and a pure Gospel. We do, my dear brother, feel a warm sympathy with you in your trials, and rejoice exceedingly with you in these expressions of love and affection for you by your beloved people, and for their appreciation of the principles which you have made so prominent in your public ministrations. This thing was not done in a corner; thousands of hearts throughout the land, who are in sympathy with you, will rejoice and give thanks. You will, I know, dear brother, receive it as given for Christ's sake. May your dear people receive a rich spiritual blessing, as the seal of the Master's approbation. We are looking forward with much interest to the time when we are to expect you again to visit us, and rejoice much in the hope that your dear wife will be able to come with you.

Affectionately yours,

ICHABOD WASHBURN.

G. B. C.'s Letter to Mr. Daniel Drake Smith.

MY DEAR MR. SMITH:

ENGLEWOOD, July 25, 1874.

My wife thinks, and so do I, that we ought at once to have made an apology for the bad conduct of our cow in breaking into your garden, and to have begged an account of damages, especially as John told us that when your gardener learned that it was our cow that had done the mischief, he generously let her off scot-free. We are quite troubled at the matter, and if there were no other way of adjustment, you might put your cow for a night or so into our garden,-only she could not do so much mischief here, and I should beg to have some one to watch her and keep her

out of Mrs. Cheever's flowers. Otherwise it would be a fair exchange, though it would do no good that I can think of. Our vegetables are not so numerous nor so rich nor so well advanced as yours; but still a good amount of desolation might be accomplished by two cows even in two hours, provided they both went at it with a good appetite. I am informed there were two, and that Dolly's accomplice (our cow's name is Dolly) was Mr. Coe's large and frisky calf. So it was Dolly & Co.,-a very respectable firm of quadrupedal burglars. Now, I know nothing. about Mr. Coe's method of developing or educating calves, but I really should not wonder if there has been some great mistake or cultivation or indulgence of some vicious tendency, which the calf, becoming intimate in the same pasture, may have taught Dolly. For Dolly is not at all flighty or frisky, much less addicted to fencebreaking, and is so modest and gentle and withal retiring, that she would never intrude either on corn or clover, except through an open gate, or when she saw that the bars had been taken down, and took it as an invitation, perhaps, to a lunch-party. Some other cow must have made a breach in Mr. Coe's fences, and then Dolly followed Mr. Coe's calf through the opening, and then possibly some gate in your premises may have been left open by accident, for I cannot think that either Mr. Coe's calf or our Dolly would go so far as to make a breach for themselves, as on purpose; but if either was so vicious as that, I feel sure it was the calf that set the example, in which case Dolly is not so much to blame. It must be said, however, in apology for either or both, that Mr. Coe's pasture is very poor in grass and plentiful in white-weed, which I know to be Dolly's abomination, and I doubt if it ever grew in Eden or in Mr. Darwin's locality of primeval man. There is perhaps no way of accounting for Dolly's conduct, except we throw ourselves on Darwin's philosophy, and suppose that this extraordinary freak in her is merely a proof of the truth of his theory of evolution and natural selection. It is, in that case, evidently the recurrence or resurrection of the tastes of savage life, tendencies of a hundred thousand years ago, when men, monkeys, and cows (for the cow, being a domestic animal, was certainly contemporaneous with man, whenever his perfection as a savage came about); tendencies on Mr. Darwin's theory not yet eliminated, but ready to break out and assert their parentage, whenever external circumstances and such a

@reature as Dolly came under the notice of natural selection. We ought all doubtless to be more on our guard in respect to all animals, because we know not what extravagance of antique savageness or cunning may at any time turn up in them, or turn them topsy-turvy. Dolly is doubtless descended from those primeval herds that inhabited what is now called the Isle of Man, before the British continent was broken from the mainland. When the submergence came and the emergence afterwards, by which processes there was the break up into islands, some of Dolly's ancestors swam across the Atlantic, which was then but a narrow channel. Now putting together these facts, namely, Alderney nature in the animal, a very poor pasture, a breach in the fence, a sudden revival of old savageness, or what Mr. Darwin calls atavism, and at the same time a gate left open in a rich neighboring garden, full of delicious beets, carrots, young corn, and so forth, and natural selection always on the watch for improvement of the species or survival of the fittest, and we have the inevitable consequence just as it turned out. Doubtless, as an enthusiastic theorist, you ought to preserve your desolated beet-beds and Dolly's history as one of the most convincing proofs of the truth of Mr. Darwin's speculations on the origin of species and of man.

Dolly proves herself an excellent scientific experimentalist concerning the value of change and variety of diet. Since her night raid into your garden our cream has been unusually rich and sweet. If your zeal for agricultural science inclines you to more experiments of this kind, we would very willingly put Dolly at your service as an expert or manipulator, who takes nothing on trust, or at second-hand, but satisfies herself by actual knowledge. Whatsoever you think best in reparation for her mischief, she or we together will most gladly accomplish.

Ever most truly your obliged friend and neighbor,
G. B. CHEEVer.

Letter to Dr. Cheever from Mr. Danl. Drake Smith. MONDAY EVENING, July 27, '74.

MY DEAR DOCTOR:

I have carefully perused your epistle, in which you have thought to extenuate the faults of Dolly by throwing the mantle of Darwin over her; but it is too small to cover her bad deeds, and if she should be disposed to

resume her nightly walks and make us a third visitation, we shall be forced to call upon "angels and ministers of grace to defend us."

I know not whether Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest is to be exemplified, as you think, by Dolly's career, but the experimental course that famous cow has been pursuing would, in primeval and ruder ages, have been more likely to conduct her to the "pound," or even to the shambles, than to eventuate in her producing a superior race of lacteal dispensers. The pasture in Mr. Coe's lot may, for aught I know, be inferior to that which whilom was in Eden; but I am inclined to believe that Dolly shares Adam's original sin, and indeed I am not quite sure that his repentant soul, in its metempsychosis, has not at last entered Dolly's body, and that under the temptation, as you allege, of Coe's "frisky calf," it has been repeating in my garden the sin that drove it out of Eden into Coe's poor pasture-lot. At any rate, I accept this theory as more applicable to the case than that of Darwin's; but as the old law of retaliation for sins committed is not now in vogue (or at least ought not to be), instead of leaving your garden gate open on Thursday evening next, as foolish people do, in order that our cow may enter, and have "a beet for a beet," et cetera, Mrs. Smith and I have concluded to call the account " square," if you and Mrs. Cheever will do us the honor to come on that evening and take tea with us, at 7 o'clock.

With much esteem and friendship,
Your neighbor,

Revd. Geo. B. Cheever, Englewood.

DANL. DRAKE SMITH.

Letter from Mr. Longfellow to Dr. Cheever.

MY DEAR CHEEVER:

CAMBRIDGE, March 3, 1875

I am very glad to hear that you have consented to deliver the Oration on the fifteenth anniversary of our Class, particularly as I am to read a poem on the occasion.

By agreement with the Committee, it is to be a Salutatory poem, to come before the Oration. In this sense I have written it, and I hope the arrangement will be agreeable to you.

I shall not be long.-not more than fifteen or twenty minutes, and you shall have the honors of the Valedictory.