It was a sharp disappointment—your inability to connect, on the Canadian raid. What a gaudy good time we should have had! Osgood & I had a good time, true, in the tranquil & restful practice of the vices; but we needed you—needed the foil & spice of a virtuous presence. The cause of your absence made the absence all the harder to bear, too. Disappointed, again, when I got back to Boston; for I was promising myself half an hour’s look at you, in Belmont; but your note to Osgood showed that that could not be allowed yet.

The Atlantic arrived an hour ago, & your faultless & delicious Police Report brought that blamed Joe Twichell powerfully before me. There’s a man who can tell such things himself (by word of mouth), & has as sure an eye for detecting a thing that is before his eyes, as any man in the world, perhaps—then why in the nation can’t he report himself with a pen? But he can’t. One of those drenching days last week, he slopped down town with his cubs, & visited a poor little beggarly shed where were a dwarf, a fat woman, & a giant of honest eight feet, on exhibition behind tawdry show-canvases, but with nobody to exhibit to. The giant had a broom, & was cleaning up & fixing around, diligently. Joe conceived the idea of getting some talk out of him. Now that never would have occurred to me. So he dropped in under the man’s e b  l b elbow, f dogged him patiently around, prodding him with questions & getting irritated snarls in return—which would have finished me early—but at last he one of Joe’s random shafts drove the centre of that giant’s sympathies somehow, & fetched him. The fountains of his great deep were broken up, & he rained a flood of personal history that was unspeakably entertaining. Among other things it turned out that he had been a Turkish (native) Colonel, & had fought all through the Crimean war—& so, for the first time Joe got a picture of the Charge of the Six Hundred that made him see the living spectacle, the flash of flags & tongue-flame, the rolling smoke, & hear the booming of the guns; & for the first time also, he heard the reasons for that wild charge delivered from by from the mouth of a master, & realized that nobody had “blundered,” but that a cold, logical, military brain had perceived this one & sole way to win an already lost battle, & so gave the command & did achieve the victory. And mind you Joe was able to come up here, days afterward, & reproduce that pi giant’s picturesque & admirable history. But dern him, he can’t write it——which is all wrong, & not as it should be.

And he has gone & raked up the MS autobiography (written in 1848,) of Mrs. Phebe Brown, (author of “I love to Steal a while Away,”) who educated Yung Wing in her family when he was a little boy; & by George I came near not getting to bed at all, last night, on account of the lurid fascinations of it. Why in the nation it has never got into print, I can’t understand.

But by jigs the postmanⒶemendation will be here in a minute; so, congratulationsⒶemendation upon your mending health, & gratitude that it is mending;—& love to you all.