Lenox, Aug., 1861.
My dear Georgy: You need not speak so coolly of our staying here three months. Three weeks will give us enough, I guess. It is actually tiresome not to have anything to do, after being so busy in New York. We only take one paper too now–the Tribune, and that does not come in till four o’clock, so that our mornings are very blank. There is a newsboy here however –think of that! who sells the New York and Boston papers every day on the hotel steps, after the arrival of the stage. And there is a brick store and a telegraph office, connecting with the telegraph in Springfield. Messages come over the wires in the short space of three days, I am told! . . . Is there not some newsstand or book-store, on Pennsylvania Avenue where Moritz can buy you the illustrated papers for the hospitals? I hope so, as we cannot send anything now except perhaps a stray Boston paper which everybody here has finished. I sent word to Edward Gilman, who has been in New York, when he goes home to Maine to mail you every now and then a Bangor paper for some sick Maine volunteers. . . . When we go back, we will constitute ourselves into a society, and do things more systematically and thoroughly. . . .
Our letters must be few and stupid. Your last to us was Eliza’s, written last Monday in camp. What scenes you must have gone through there, in the arrest and examination of those women spies! What strange romance history will be, by and bye, to May and Bertha. Gay ladies and courtly gentlemen, and ragged rebel volunteers, and city brokers, and wily politicians, all assigned their respective cells side by side, perhaps, in Fort Lafayette. You wonder what “horse-cakes” are, which the old woman declared her packets of letters to be, when found between her shoulders. They are gingerbread of the “round heart” consistency, cut in the flat, rude shape of a prancing horse with very prominent ears and very stubbed legs, sold in various small shops in Alexandria, along with candy balls, penny whistles and fly-specked ballads. “Horse-cakes” are an Alexandria institution. You should buy a few for lunch some day in the bakery. . . . We live in the newspapers and in your letters. It is impossible to think of anything else. I have tried on successive afternoons to get interested in Motley’s Netherlands, and give it up as a bad job. One reads a sentence over and over without getting the sense of it. And then, I remembered, that I couldn’t remember a name, or fact, or date in the three volumes of Motley’s other work; so what’s the use of reading anything? “Fort Sumter” is ancient history enough for me. To-day we have quite a budget of news–the details of Butler’s expedition to Fort Hatteras, which of course had to be successful. They went against the weakest point of the coast, with an overwhelming force. Little as it is, it serves for a subject of brag for us, and the newspapers glory over it as a splendid naval victory in the style of true Southern reports. We have the text of Fremont’s proclamation. It is all very well in itself, but I don’t see the object of setting slaves free in Missouri, and setting soldiers to catch them in Virginia;–shooting rebels out west and letting them off with “a mild dose of oath of allegiance” in Washington. . . . It is my growing conviction that nothing would be worse for the country than to be let off easy in this war. We should learn to think lightly of Divine guidance and Divine judgments. Providence means to humble and punish us thoroughly before full success is granted, and it is best so.