Boston, January 13th.
Dear Girls: I dare say you will expect a letter from me while I am in Boston. . . . I find it exactly as I left it three years ago, only warmer. It used to be the coldest place imaginable, but the heated term seems to be on, so there is no skating and no talk of it. The Sanitary Commission occupies all the ladies, and in the spare time they work for the contrabands. Mrs. Huntington Wolcott is entirely devoted to it. She keeps thirty poor women in sewing and runs I don’t know how many machines. Mattie Parsons, too, has come out in an entirely new character and fairly slaves for the cause, besides taking care of two families of volunteers in Mr. Stackpole’s regiment, left destitute. They say she recruited a fourth of his company and knows every man in it. They are all devoted to the “Captain’s lady,” and swear to bring him safely home to her. . . . I went out to Cambridge on Saturday to review the scenes of my youth—three years ago—at the Prof. Agassiz’ School. Alas! the former familiar faces that were wont to flatten their noses against the law school windows no longer beam upon my path; they are married and gone, and I am sorry to say the best are in the rebel army. The undergraduates look very small and the college grounds don’t seem as classic as of yore.
