Holograph, signed.

John Murray Forbes is going to his island to escape the tainted air of Boston and get some sleep. He will ask his friend Mrs. H. M. Chapman, who runs a "Typewriter," to send Maria Weston Chapman a copy of what he wrote to "friend Whittier" and perhaps one of the latter's answer. John M. Forbes will have seen what W. L. Garrison, Jr., wrote, "which is worthy of his great father." Maria W. Chapman's note was "exactly right" and came in time to reach the "infected districts of Boston and New Bedford with Col. Hollowell's pithy telegraph to the sargeant who left his leg & carried off his colors from the slippery ramparts of Fort Wagner." Francis G. Shaw has gone. "Nobody has yet repeated that best epitaph of his on Col. [Robert G.] Shaw, better man than any I know in history, when offered by Lincoln a restoration of his son's body (who was buried under his niggers[)] as the chivalry said-- Let Robert's bones rest there, it is the best monument a soldier can have."

In the postscript, John M. Forbes explains the enclosure of a circular.