To Mrs. J. P. Lesley.

Cambridge, Nov. 16, 1854.

We take great pleasure in accepting your kind invitation to spend Thanksgiving with you. ... I shall see, I imagine, little Mary walking very briskly, and rapidly coming to that period when, first becoming conscious of herself, she will see the fresh and bright forms of those intuitions (afterwards by experience turned into common sense) which will make her the little oracle we used to talk about. James and I have nearly finished the “Jesus and his Biographers” of Mr. Furness, and are very much impressed by it. The great doctrine of the book, however, is, it seems to me, a great step in philosophy; and it is because most men have too narrow notions of what is meant by “in the course of nature,” and too vague notions of the Christian miracles themselves, that they do not think more like Mr. Furness. Many events that are so emphatically in the course of nature that they are enumerated in books of science, are events that have never happened more than two or three times, — events brought about by costly and careful experiments (as in the laboratory), and yet are regarded as more truly facts of nature than those of the ordinary course of events.

But this sounds more like an essay than a letter, and I hope you will excuse me for resorting to my old hobbies to fill a letter, for I am entirely out of the letter way of thinking.

In August, 1855, he writes pleasantly to his classmate Darwin Ware, Ware was an intimate friend, from whose recollections of Chauncey I shall repeatedly quote. They were room-mates at Cambridge in 1856, and were companions in several summer journeys. ³⁰ in reference to a plan for going to Northampton, whither I had preceded them on foot: —

“I should have answered your note immediately, if I had

not been on the point of an expedition afoot, for the day, to Chelsea Beach, where I dipped and toasted myself to my heart’s content. By Saturday, I shall be ready for another turn, so as to be sufficiently colored for my journey to Northampton.

“I found by my yesterday’s experience that twenty miles per day, at least for the first day, is best enjoyed as a background to present ease; and as for the second day, — this being my second day, I am competent to judge that twenty miles on the second day isn't enjoyed at all.”