Form, expression, the whole man and soul, on which years cannot leave the least dint of a tooth.

The youthfulness is extraordinary.

We are all crying out against our 'black lines' (laying them all to the sun of course!) and even pretty women of our acquaintance in Rome come out with some twenty years additional on their heads, to their great dissatisfaction.

But my dear Mr.Martin is my dear Mr.Martin still, unblacked, unchanged, as when I knew him in the sun long ago, when suns were content to make funny places, instead of drawing pictures! How good of dearest Mrs.Martin (it was she, I think!) to send this to me! I wish she (or he) had sent me hers besides.

(How grasping some of us are!) Then she sent me a short time since a book for my Peni, which he seized on with blazing eyes and an exclamation, 'Oh, what fun!' A work by his great author, Mayne Reid, who outshines all other authors, unless it's Robinson Crusoe, who, of course, wrote his own life.