Some Old Letters

When great reviews and speechmakings fill Moscow's Red Square, the Communists who have the best view of the proceedings are a few research professors and guards at the windows of the twin-spired Historical Museum at the north end. Behind one of those windows last week a U. S. teacher named Arthur Fletcher was taking time off from his research duties in the Institute of the Monopoly of Foreign Trade to pore over a bourgeois treasure the museum director had found for him: The Talisman in Sir Walter Scott's first draft.

"Haven't you any more like this?" asked Researcher Fletcher. The director thought he had some old letters somewhere, if he could lay his hands on them. Finally he produced an envelop out of which Mr. Fletcher eased a packet of yellow papers. They were:

P: A letter from the great parliamentarian Edmund Burke, indicating "grief, horror and disgust" at news of the French Revolution and surprise at the Marquis de La Fayette's failure to crush it.

P: A letter in Spanish from the Duke of Wellington.

P: A letter to his publisher from Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

P: A letter signed George Washington, dated Mount Vernon, June 21, 1785. Writing of the forwardness of U. S. pioneers in invading the Mississippi against the King of Spain's order closing the river to U. S. navigation, Washington declared: "The emigrations to the waters thereof are astonishingly great; and chiefly of that description of people who are not very susceptible to law and order and good government. It will be difficult to restrain people of this class from enjoying natural advantages."

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