A little snow falls every night now, and the days are cold for this climate. It looks more like winter than I have seen it. The news from Denmark is unfavorable to that country. I fear she is to be sacrificed to the jealousies of Germany. Yet the effect is to stir up all the passions of Europe. A quiet day, which I devoted to my accounts, and partly to my studies of coins. At the late sale, I purchased some curious ones through Mr Court. One which I take to be the earliest currency coined in North America. Even before the pine tree of Massachusetts. A walk, and then to Lady Russell’s to dinner, with Mrs Adams and Mary. The company consisted of Lord and Lady Grey, Dean Stanley and his bride, Lady Bloomfield, Mr Frende, the historian Mr Arthur Russell, Major Blackett, and a Mr Stepford. It was rather pleasant than otherwise, though I was not very favorably placed. Lord Russell seemed quite in a lively mood. He told me he had been replying in the Lords to Lord Derby’s attack upon him on American affairs. The other night his Lordship having seen in a newspaper Mr Seward’s instructions to me of the 11th of July last pounced upon one passage of them which is certainly pretty threatening and demanded to know if the ministry had put up with such a tone. Lord Russell replied this evening by saying that no such paper as that described had ever been addressed a letter to Lord Russell, anticipating all parts of these instructions excepting the questionable threats. When therefore these arrived, I deemed it superfluous to go over the ground again, and particularly hazardous to put in the offers in portion. It looked to me like war. So even in the critical moment of the fourth of September, I preferred the course of waiting for new instructions to putting it in. In my belief it would have raised a needless barrier to later movements in reconciliation. Mr Seward himself approved my course in a later Despatch. To the outer world, this does not appear. The conclusion will be that I declined to show the instructions. If by that, it be understood that I presented a quarrel, I ask for nothing more in my Diplomacy. The Danish matter was thought to look badly tonight. The Germans seem determined to obtain scrutiny for all their demands.570