Mamma has sent me your composition, and I am very greatly pleased with it, and very much obliged to Mamma for sending it. I meant to return it to Mamma, but sealed my letter previously. So I’ll get you to do it for me.

It appears that the violin is becoming quite the fashion among girls. One of Gen. Fairchilde’s daughters plays that instrument.Ⓐemendation I didn’t see the girls except the one that was a baby inserted by SLC: when we knew them in Paris. They were away on a visit. It is said that one of them is very beautiful.

In this hotel, (the Grand Pacific) there is a colored youth who stands near the great dining room door, and takes the hats off the gentlemen as they pass into dinner & sets them away. The people come in shoals & sometimes he has his arms full of hats & is kept moving in a most lively way. Yet he remembers every hat, & when these people come crowding out, an hour, or an hour & a half later he hands to each gentlemanⒶemendation his hat & never makes any mistake. I have watched him to see how he did it but I couldn’t see that he more than merely glanced at his man if he even did that much. I have tried a couple of times to make him believe he was giving me the wrong hat, but it didn’t persuade him in the least. He intimated that I might be in doubt, but that he knew.