“I have had a strange half-gouty attack that has put me out of sorts for the last few days, but I am again at work and trying to get ‘The Dodds’ out of Baden. I hope you like it, and that the characters appear to you each marked and distinguished.
“Politically we are expecting great things, for if any breach of the peace occurs in Europe, all Italy will be in arms against the Austrians in twenty-four hours.”
“Charlie has just reached us in perfect health and spirits, and already told us of all your kindness to him, and at a time, too, when your anxieties were so deeply engaged about your own boy. My best wishes go with him, and I fervently trust he may meet fortune and happiness in the world beyond the seas,--for, indeed, I can no longer see what is open to any of us in this quarter. Could I recall twenty years of life I’d emigrate tomorrow.
“I find Charlie greatly grown and in full strength and vigour, but I am sorely puzzled as to his future; and in reality in this old system of Latin and Greek education I neither perceive any impulse given to intellectual development, nor any solid groundwork of knowledge. I follow it, however, as I would go with a current. _Voilà tout!_
“I have had four days of bad gout--stomach and knees alternately attacked. I’m now better, though terribly depressed and very weak.
“We are in all the anxieties of a great crisis, and every one asks, Shall we have war? I believe Russia has advanced to the present position in full reliance that we and France never can act in concert, and bases all her hopes on racial and irreconcilable grudges. If we do agree, certes nothing can resist us; but the hypothetical ‘if’ is all the question. I enclose this hurriedly to go with a M’Glashan packet of ‘Jasper.’”
“Your letter reached me in the very nick of a negotiation of which Charley was the object. The Messrs Sandell, the Engineers to whom the Tuscan and some other of the Italian railroads have been conceded, have made me an offer to take him as a pupil and make him a C.E. I hesitated when first the proposition reached me, and I thought it was possible he might possess talents likely to win college honours and distinction, and make a fair chance of what follows on them. I find that this is less likely than I had believed; that his natural indolence requires the spur of a personal interest to stimulate it,--and this probably a real career may effect. He certainly likes the notion greatly, and appears as if the choice was really what he himself would have made. I accepted, therefore, and he does not return to Ireland. God grant that I may have done wisely what I have done maturely and after much reflection.