Cloudy with light rain. I begin early this work to write my letter home as the later days bid fair to be interrupted. My interruptions from visits are likewise serious deductions to be foreseen. The applications at the Office for passports alone average about five a day besides all the transient and idle who came to get information. In the afternoon we went by invitation to a concert given by Miss Coutts, at which the Duchess of Cambridge and her daughter were to be. We were ushered into the same salon in which we witnessed Mr Fechter’s performance, excepting that the seats were reversed. We were ranged by degrees, but it was four o’clock before the Duchess arrived. I found not more than three or four acquaintances. The social system of the English is quite peculiar. Miss Coutts labours in entertaining, because she thinks it her bounden duty to spend her great income suitably, but her want of proclivity that way is manifest enough. Her guests are never at their ease. The music was very good. A selection of airs from different Operas, by six singers including Allvi, who looks as well as she did when in America, and Reconi, Madam Peneo, Graziani, and two or three more. I was glad to get away from the formal constraint, and go home and dine. In the evening Mrs Adams, who excused herself from the concert, went with me to a reception at the Duke of Somerset’s at the Admiralty—and from there to the Marquis of Westminster’s, which we reached a little late. The house of the latter is well worth seeing. It is the finest I have yet found. He has a gallery of fine pictures, which we were promised the sight of in the day time. We did not get home until after one o’clock.