influences.
Letters from home ! blessed be letters I Though they come travel-stained from a voyage of seven thousand miles, across two oceans and a continent, they are as fresh with old associations, as fragrant with sweet reminiscences as if penned but yesterday. How like angels' visits they come at steamer intervals, and what a spell their presence casts, freighted as they are with love and kind greetings. Many a time have I sat at my table, far into the night, opening one after another from a pile of business correspondence before me, having first selected and placed unopened on one side, yet not so far away but that my hungry eye could rest on them, all that breathed of tender memories and pure affection, resolutely holding them there, the best for the last. There they lay filling the room as with a spiritual attendance, throwing their magic influence into every fibre of my being, and dimming with moisture the eyes that would not cease to look on them. Then with what tremulously sweet and bitter emotions T would take them up and break- ing the seals, let into my fluttering heart the soothing stream of mellow memories, drank once more from the fountains of my youth, and bathed my weary soul in the sacred atmosphere of home. Sweet silent messages, whose witching presence can so wean our sordid vision from the seducing mirage of glittering dust !
An impecunious discouraged young man digging at Columbia, who had found his friends at home de- linquent in writing to him, determined to bring a re- sponse if it lay in the power of ink and goose-quill. Accordingly he seated himself and wrote three or four old gossips asking the price of land, and stock, what advantageous investments offered, what a fine farm of two or three hundred acres could be purchased for — since which time during his stay in California there was not a mail but brought him letters.
The new post-office building, now in the autumn of 1852 fronting on the plaza, and extending fr
