Dedicated to Miss Kitty, oh! I beg pardon, to Miss Temple.
The following curious facts were discovered by the Chemist James in some of his recent investigations:
At Pensacola, Fla., there is a navy yard, and consequently many officers of the U.S.A.
In Pensacola there is a larger proportional number of old maids than in any city of the Union.
The ladies of Pensacola, instead of seeking an eligible partner in the middle ranks of society, spend their lives in a vain attempt to entrap the officers who flirt with them and then leave Pensacola. The moral lesson is evident.
The "Kitty" to whom James addressed the next letter was another cousin, the daughter of one of his father's elder brothers. Her husband was the alienist to whom the reader will remember that the mad Minny was consigned in a previous letter. It should also be explained that James's two youngest brothers had now entered the Union army, and that one of them, Wilky, adjutant of the first colored regiment, had been wounded in the charge on Fort Wagner in which Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed.
To Mrs. Katharine James (Mrs. William H.) Prince.
CAMBRIDGE, Sept. 12, 1863.
My dear Cousin Kitty,—I was very agreeably surprised at getting your letter a few days after arriving here, and am heartily glad to find that you still remember me and think sometimes of the visit you paid us that happy summer. I often think of you, and at such times feel very much like renewing our delightful converse. Several times I have been on the uttermost brink of writing to you, but somehow or other I have always quailed at plunging over. Nature makes us so awkward. I again felt several times like going to pay you a short visit,—last winter and this spring, I remember,—but hesitated, never having been invited, and being entirely ignorant how you would receive me, whether you would chain me up in your asylum and scourge me, or what—tho' I believe those good old days are over.
When you were at our house, I recollect I was in the first flush of my chemical enthusiasm. A year and a half of hard work at it here has somewhat dulled my ardor; and after half a year's vegetation at home, I am back here again, studying this time Comparative Anatomy. I am obliged before the 15th of January to make finally and irrevocably "the choice of a profession." I suppose your sex, which has, or should have, its bread brought to it, instead of having to go in search of it, has no idea of the awful responsibility of such a choice. I have four alternatives: Natural History, Medicine, Printing, Beggary. Much may be said in favor of each. I have named them in the ascending order of their pecuniary invitingness. After all, the great problem of life seems to be how to keep body and soul together, and I have to consider lucre. To study natural science, I know I should like, but the prospect of supporting a family on $600 a year is not one of those rosy dreams of the future with which the young are said to be haunted. Medicine would pay, and I should still be dealing with subjects which interest me—but how much drudgery and of what an unpleasant kind is there! Of all departments of Medicine, that to which Dr. Prince devotes himself is, I should think, the most interesting. And I should like to see him and his patients at Northampton very much before coming to a decision.