I folded my portion of these dispatches small, wrapped them in thin gutta-percha, and, going to the most obscure shoemaker in the part of London which I knew, had the heel of one of my boots excavated and the packet deposited in the hole and covered over again by a stout heel-tap.  My orders were to take at least six weeks for the journey, to go by a roundabout route, and travel as if for pleasure.  From the Austrian territory I was to write to Kossuth all the political information I could collect, the messages being conveyed in a cryptograph in which the form of the letter was to be that of a correspondence between lovers.  The words composing the message were to be written on spaces left in a mask of which each had a copy, and the spaces between the words then filled up so that the letter would carry some meaning when read as a whole.  Love-letters were supposed to give most room for nonsense.  Knowing very little French, I bought a pocket dictionary and a copy of Racine, and, during a ten days’ stay in Paris, by diligent use of the former in all my transactions, I picked up enough for the needs of travel, and, spending all my leisure over the latter, I was, before my mission was over, able to converse with considerable fluency and knew my Racine thoroughly.

From Paris I made the journey to Brussels in the company of an American gentleman, Mr. Coxe, of Alabama, traveling with his wife and daughter.  At Brussels I made, through the Coxes, the acquaintance of M. Le Hardy de Beaulieu, the leader of a section of the Belgian Liberals, whose father had held a command in the Belgian contingent at Waterloo.  My acquaintance with M. Le Hardy lasted many years, he being much interested in America, and having, with his brother, founded a Belgian colony in Alabama.  The ancestral estate of the Le Hardys included part of the field of Waterloo, and we visited it in company with M. Le Hardy, who pointed out the trenches made by the heavy artillery of Napoleon still distinguishable on the surface of the fields in spite of the subsequent ploughings.  I suppose that his familiarity with the fields from his boyhood gives authority to his assurance that the depressions we saw were the effect of the ploughing of the guns in the wet, soft earth, and did not exist in the natural lay of the land, and the incident brought one very near to the great struggle which fixed for long the position of England in European politics.  M. Le Hardy had been, like his father before him, urged to resume the title of nobility which the father had renounced in the warmth of the republican movement prior to the Empire, having burned the patent in the square at Brussels; but, like the father, he had always refused.  He was a consistent and, as he would now be classed, a moderate republican.