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NEW YORK, Oct. 7, 1894.

DEAR MIRIAM,—You mustn’t think that I’m lonely every day. I haven’t time to be lonely generally. It’s only now and then nights that I feel as if I’d like to have somebody to talk to about old times. But I don’t understand what you mean about this Miss Stanwood. I didn’t speak to her in the car that day, and I haven’t seen her since. You forget that I don’t know her except by sight. It was you who used to tell me about the Gilt-Edged Girl, and her fine clothes and her city ways, and all that.

This last week I’ve been going to the Young Men’s Christian Association, where there’s a fine library and a big reading-room with all sorts of papers and magazines—I never knew there were so many before. It’s going to be a great convenience to me, that reading-room is, and I shall try to improve myself with the advantages I can get there. But whenever I’ve read anything in a magazine that’s at all good, then I want to talk it over with you as we used to do. You know so much more about books and history than I do, and you always make me see the fine side of things. I’m afraid my appreciation of the ideal needs to be cultivated. But you are a good-enough ideal for me; I found that out ages ago, and it didn’t take me so very long, either. You weren’t meant to teach school every winter; and it won’t be so very many winters before you will be down here in New York keeping house for a junior partner in Fassiter, Smith & Kiddle—or some firm just as big.

I can write that way to you, Miriam, but I couldn’t say anything like that down at the store. It isn’t that they’d jeer at me, though they would, of course—because most of them haven’t any ambition and just spend their money on their backs, or on the races, or anyhow. No, I haven’t the confidence these New-Yorkers have. Why, I whisper to the car conductors to let me off at the corner, and I do it as quietly as I can, for I don’t want them all looking at me. But a man who was brought up in the city, he just glances up from his paper and says “Twenty-third!” And probably nobody takes any notice of him, except the conductor. I wonder if I’ll ever be so at home here as they are.

Even the children are different here. They have the same easy confidence, as though they’d seen everything there was to see long before they were born. But they look worn, too, and restless, for all they take things so easy.

You ask if I’ve joined a church yet. Well, I haven’t. I can’t seem to make up my mind. I’ve been going twice every Sunday to hear different preachers. There’s none of them with the force of your father—none of them as powerful as he is, either in prayer or in preaching. I’m going to Dr. Thurston’s next Sunday; he’s got some of the richest men in town in his congregation.

There must be rich men in all the churches I’ve been to, for they’ve got stained-glass windows, and singers from the opera, they say, at some of them. I haven’t heard anybody sing yet whose voice is as sweet as a little girl’s I know—a little bit of a girl who plays the organ and teaches in Sunday-school—and who doesn’t know how much I love her.

JACK.