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NEW YORK, Oct. 14, 1894.

DEAR MIRIAM,—Yes, it is a great comfort to me always to get your bright letters, so full of hope and love and strength. You are grit, clear through, and I’m not half good enough for you. Your last letter came Saturday night; and that’s when I like to get them, for Sunday is the only day I have time to be lonely.

I go to church in the forenoon and in the evening again; in the afternoon I’ve been going up to Central Park. There’s a piece of woods there they call the Ramble, and I’ve found a seat on a cobble up over the pond. The trees are not very thrifty, but they help me to make believe I am back in Auburnvale. Sometimes I go into the big Museum there is in the Park, not a museum of curiosities, but full of pictures and statuary, ever so old some of it, and very peculiar. Then I wish for you more than ever, for that’s the sort of thing you’d be interested in and know all about.

Last Sunday night I went to Dr. Thurston’s church, and I thought of you as soon as the music began. I remember you said you did wish you were an organist in a Gothic church where they had a pipe-organ. Well, the organ at Dr. Thurston’s would just suit you, it’s so big and deep and fine. And you’d like the singing, too; it’s a quartet, and the tenor is a German who came from the Berlin opera; they say he gets three thousand dollars a year just for singing on Sunday.

But I suppose it pays them to have good voices like his, for the church was crowded; and even if some of the congregation came for the music, they had to listen to Dr. Thurston’s sermon afterward. And it was a very good sermon, indeed—almost as good as one of your father’s, practical and chockful of common sense. And Dr. Thurston isn’t afraid of talking right out in meeting, either. He was speaking of wealth and he said it had to be paid for just like anything else, and that many a man buys his fortune at too high a price, especially if he sacrifices for it either health or character. And just in front of him sat old Ezra Pierce, one of the richest men in the city—and one of the most unscrupulous, so they say. He’s worth ten or twenty millions at least; I was up in the gallery and he was in the pew just under me, so I had a good look at him. I wonder how it must feel to be as rich as all that.

And who do you suppose was in the pew just across the aisle from old Pierce? Nobody but the Gilt-Edged Girl, as you call her, that Miss Stanwood. So you see it’s a small world even in a big city, and we keep meeting the same people over and over again.

I rather think I shall go to Dr. Thurston’s regularly now. I like to belong to a church and not feel like a tramp every Sunday morning. Dr. Thurston is the most attractive preacher I’ve heard yet, and the music there is beautiful.

I don’t suppose I shall ever be as rich as old Ezra Pierce, although I don’t see why not, but if ever I am really rich I’ll have a big house, with a great big Gothic music-room, with a pipe-organ built in one end of it. I guess I could get Some One to play on it for me when I come home evenings tired out with making money down-town. I wonder if she guesses how much I love her?

JACK.