Dear Girls: Your full, interesting letters have come in and given great relief. G’s of today is certainly altogether more cheerful in tone than Eliza’s of Tuesday, and very naturally. We are beginning to “look up “ a little, too. Your rebuff by Miss Dix has been the subject of great indignation, but we all devoutly hope you will not mind it in the least. . . . Whatever you do, go in and win. Outflank the Dix by any and every means in your power, remembering that prison visitors and hospital visitors and people who really desire to do good, have taken no notice of obstacles except to vanquish them, and as soon as one avenue was closed have turned with perfect persistence to another. We shall be very much disappointed if you do not establish some sort of relations with the hospitals, at least enough to give you free access, and to make a reliable channel for such things as we can send. You ought certainly to get those boxes to-day if not sooner. . . All your details are very interesting. Pray, send any that you collect, and make Joe write out or dictate to one of you a connected story of what he saw and did from the time of the advance up to the Monday morning when he came in. It will be invaluable, and ought to be done while it is fresh. Your “mémoires pour servir” may immortalize you yet.. .. We have seen only a few people the last day or two, Mr. Denny, F. Bond, and Col. Perkins. All cheerful, hopeful and undaunted, say we can have ten men to every one lost now; that there is settled determination to use every resource to the uttermost. Uncle E. says, setting his teeth, “to the last drop of my blood!” Abby desponds. Thinks Scott to blame, that his tide of fortune is turning, or that he is childish, or, at best, that he let the cabinet have its way this time for the sake of saying, “I told you so.” We begin to grin now when Abby begins to croak, but there is certainly something in what she says. Don’t keep drumming about our going away. We should have been crazy if we had been in suspense in some small country place the last week or two. When things subside, and look nearly settled for the present, we will take our own time and go. . . Frank Goddard is in the rebel army at Sewall’s Point. “Hopes it will make no difference in our pleasant relations.” Hm!!! perhaps it won’t.
Why don’t you come home? Now’s your chance, if at all. The rebel army before Washington will melt away like a cloud and come down again suddenly in Kentucky, Missouri, Jeff knows where, where we are weak and unexpecting, and leave us sitting like fools behind our laborious entrenchments that nobody means to take. . . . How can you doubt Fremont? There has been no positive charge against him from any respectable source, only malevolent rumors, filling the air, coming no doubt from the Blairs and other malignant personal enemies who hate him, because they are slave-holders and he is just now the apostle of liberation. I announce my adhesion still and my painful anxiety that he should retrieve himself in Missouri against all the heavy odds of fortune. . . . It is pitiful to see how great and general a defection from him has grown out of absolutely nothing (so far) of any authority. . . . Take some measures to make Frank Bacon let his beard grow; tell him to go to Jericho with his “Victor Emmanuel.” He is in the late fashion, by the bye; so much the worse. Why should a man who can look like a knight of the table of the blameless King voluntarily look like a Lynn shoemaker?
“Yet, oh fair maid, thy mirth refrain,
Thy hand is on a lion’s mane.”
Quote me to him; who’s afraid? . . . Goodbye. I hope the highly accommodating Providence which directs, or rather acquiesces in all G.’s movements, will afford you both every facility for whatever you want to do. . . .