CHAPTER XV.
Lesbia’s Correspondence, and the Penumbra of the Dream Upon Letitia.
It will readily be supposed that letters began to pass between the bosom friends without much delay. Some extracts from their communications may be more suggestive than the tittle-tattle which most young ladies still wrote to each other, even at the date of our story’s outset.
No. 1.—Letitia to Lesbia, dated New York, Oct. 189—.
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‘Well, as I was telling you, as we got into the “rolling forties” off Newfoundland, it blew pretty stiff from the north-west almost a head wind. This floored half the passengers, but I am a good sailor and did not mind it. I passed some of the time in the smoking-room—I smoke a good deal at sea, to the scandal of the old fogies of propriety. Among the men I used to meet there were three Irish Nationalists, who gave me an eye-opening about the dangerous state of feeling that is growing again in their country, and still more on this side of the water, since the change of Ministry in England. As girls like you and me, sweet Lesbia, have no national resentments, looking upon all our sex as belonging
