Engelmann promises to make us a visit in the spring. How I shall make him work! No other news just now.
MY DEAR SIR EDWARD,--It is high time that I thanked you for a very pleasant letter which at the beginning of the year you kindly wrote me from Failand House, a place which is very green in our memories. It reached us at Washington, where, with Mrs. Gray as my inseparable companion, I went to attend the annual meeting of the regents of the Smithsonian Institution. We were away from home little more than a week, and even in that time we managed to bring in a little visit to friends in Philadelphia.
This miserable trial of Guiteau, of which you already knew unpleasant particulars, was still in progress; but I did not go near the court-room, and could not readily have been induced to do so. The day after I received your letter I met an acquaintance, one of the judges of the Court of Claims (a court for trying claims against the United States government preferred by citizens or others, and much is it to be wished that a mass of claims presented to Congress and cumbering its committees could be passed over to this court), and I drew him into conversation upon the scandal which the trial was causing. He spoke of Judge Cox as a man of ability and high character, referred to the impossibility of shutting the prisoner’s mouth, the expectation that the man’s prolonged revelation of himself before the jury would throw more light upon the case than any amount of expert testimony, which I think was expected to be more contradictory than it actually was, and of the determination to leave no ground for the ordering of a new trial. My friend told me he had been twice in the courtroom, thought the judge might and should have exercised more control, yet that what he saw and heard did not appear to him at the time so indecorous and offensive as it appeared when presented in the newspapers. Indeed, this sensational newspaper reporting is a huge nuisance, and in respect to these matters our highest-class daily papers are little better than the lowest. I suppose the telegraph reporting for the press is all done by one set of men, and the more sensational the reports the more welcome to the papers, which, with few exceptions, print without any selection or discrimination.