A Physiological Phenomenon.
His hair is tinged with silver. His beard is sprinkled with snow, though two months ago it was of unmingled brown.
"Nor turned it white
In a single night,
As men's have done from sudden fears;"
but it did blanch under the absorbing labors and anxieties of two months—a physiological fact which Doctor Holmes will be good enough to explain to us at his earliest convenience.
Mrs. Fremont is in camp, but will return to Saint Louis when the army moves. She inherits many traits of her father's character. She possesses that "excellent thing in woman," a voice, like Annie Laurie's, low and sweet—more rich, more musical, and better modulated, than that of any tragédienne upon the stage. To a broad, comprehensive intellect she adds those quick intuitions which leap to results, anticipating explanations, and those proclivities for episode, incident, and bits of personal analyzing, which make a woman's talk so charming.
How much rarer this grace of familiar speech than any other accomplishment whatever! In a lifetime one meets not more than four or five great conversationalists. Jessie Benton Fremont is among the felicitous few, if not queen of them all.
October 8.
The army is forty thousand strong. Generals Sigel, Hunter, Pope, Asboth, and McKinstry command respectively its five divisions.
Sigel, Hunter, Pope, Asboth, McKinstry.