To Mrs. Cotton. BUDE, Nov. 29, 1869. This is the dullest of wet mornings, and it occurs to me that there is no better way of brightening it up than writing to you. So I put by my darning, and place your photograph so that you look at me calmly with hand suspended as if in excellent listening mood. Can I bring you back in thought to Bude to-day will you come though it is at its worst? Saturday was furious, rain dashing at the panes, blurring them so that one could scarce see the red river of mud that swelled up to its banks, spreading over much of the sand and staining the whole of the bay. Really Saturday was almost sublimely wild. This morning it is only dull persistent rain. Sitting at the window I watch the carts crawl along the sand, the patient horses having hard work with their heavy loads; near at hand the building of new houses, the going up and down the ladders of active, intelligent-looking workmen, with straight profiles and tufty heads, who get on rapidly let the weather be what it may. And rapidly coming in, tossing about the bleak rocks, are rows of white waves, asking only a ray of light to be beautiful. To think that it is rather more than a month since I heard from you, more since I wrote to you! You have been moving about so much (of course this is only the vainest excuse, but anything will do in the matter of letter-writing) and do you know, taking it for granted that you are now at I feel rather shy of you there, in an atmosphere so essentially unlike that in which I have my being, and with a friend excellent and admirable I well believe in many and many a point where I should prove mere failure, but so different a type that from her point of view I must be reprehensible in most things and unintelligible in the rest. Ah, my dear one, do not even open this letter down-stairs! Wait till bedtime, and let me feel I am having a chat with you and the beloved General, and then I can breathe. The very retrospect of the powdered footmen and the rigidity of Miss -'s moral sense was beginning to make me feel quite formal. Those words, "rigidity," etc., betray me into a bit of lowest gossip. Well! There was a certain stone-breaker I had encountered in my solitary springtime walks, and taken a fancy to, he was so cheerful in spite of rheumatism, and so quaint in his way of expressing himself. And he appreciated a little tobacco. However, I had not come across him for some time when one early day in November it occurred to me that I would go to his cottage with my humble offering. The door was opened by a respectable woman with handkerchief up to her face. I thought my friend was dead. No, he had been ill and was well again, but she, the wife, was suffering sadly, and there to be sure was a fearful boil on the upper lip; the inflamed, tightly stretched skin exposed to the air, and nothing to mitigate the pain. You see at once what an opening for my medical skill, and like all quacks I pique myself a good deal. Never was a patient that responded more kindly to wet lint and oil silk, and she was such a pleasant, countrified, Welsh kind of woman, and gave me such a fee of apples (I had to take it too), and did not turn up her nose at Liebig, and in short our relations were most satisfactory when an unwelcome ray of light is thrown upon the case. She is the mother of Mrs.'s husband, the mother too of five other sons, all entitled simply to the mother's name, and brothers only on the mother's side. I positively staggered. One must draw a line, and become rigid somewhere. Ah no -rigid nowhere — but you can understand that my pleasure is spoiled. The worst of these departures from the right is that they entail subterfuge and deceit. Mrs., with her first baby, has just gone to her husband's house. Poor young man! Naturally too the young wife may not like to keep up more than can be helped of that relationship. I must end my gossip by saying that the stone-breaker is really the husband, and speaks with a touching tenderness of his "old woman." I fear she is getting into thoroughly bad health, but here where doctors are sober I dare not practise extensively. And the dampness of the cottage by the canal would nullify quinine, I fear. And so it ends like most cases with a mere sigh, "The pity of it, the pity of it!" Mr. gives a frightful picture of the open rebellion of feeling and language at Cork. Indeed, the state of Ireland is enough to make any one grave, and those who viewed in a disestablished Church and a promised Land Bill merely sops to Cerberus will no doubt loudly proclaim that they have failed to conciliate him. Nevertheless, "Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra!" Things that have gone wrong so long won't come right at once. Our "Times" brings us in plenty of excitement. Is not dear General Cotton glad about Dr. Livingstone, and interested about these strange underground people, the Rua? And the unexpected result of these late Deep Sea dredgings, too! How can any one ever be dull in such a wondrous world any one, that is, who is heart-happy and in health! We have had a new book parcel, with charming numbers of the "Revue des Deux Mondes." I should like you to read Mr. M. Arnold's two papers in the "Cornhill on St. Paul. We 've got Browning's "Ring and Book" too, hard reading rather, crabbed, contorted; full of rough power and beauty, no doubt, further on. I've read your beautiful Spectrum book with attention and delight, and shall read it again. I have come to believing that all books of that nature should be read twice. The days are very short, though. A little reading after breakfast of some improving book; then comes the post, and the abstract gives way to the personal; then, when it is fine, we get a good walk-to Widemouth not unfrequently, and passing the cottage I remember how pleasant it was to rest there on the way to Nuthook; and often, dear one, I improve localities by associating them with you. William and I live now all day long together, and almost always walk together; and though variety is essential for us all, and this is too spoiling, too petting, too flattering a life, and it will do me good no doubt to have a little friction and a little sense of being seen through indifferent eyes- yet I do emphatically record it best and sweetest of all lives, and wish for all who are one that they could be cast on a desert island, say for seven months out of the twelve! By the way, my little lines which I repeated to you are in the new "Good Words." So slight, it must be out of good nature Mr. Strahan put them in; but still, being from the heart, some heart may echo them. These are the "little lines." MOODS. Lord, in Thy sky of blue, No stain of cloud appears; Help me to thank Thee, then, I pray, Lord, when I look on high, Clouds only meet my sight; Help me to trust Thee, then, I pray, Wait in the dark and tearfully obey. CHAPTER XXVI. RIPENING YEARS. (From the Memoir.) WE left Bude, as I have said, early in January, left it for Bath, and there spent three weeks under the roof of my husband's old and true friend, Mrs. Haughton. In my pocket-book for this year he wrote, "A new decade; the old wish: May it be a repetition of the last!" There had been several entries of the kind: "May we have no new years, only the old ones back again;" "May the new year be happy as the old," etc. As we purposed spending the following spring and summer in the north, at our dear Newton Place, we fixed upon Edinburgh for the few intervening winter weeks. I was greatly occupied with a dearly-loved invalid friend, and spent all my evenings with her. 66 March found us once more at Newton Place, where we were welcomed and ministered to with an affection that we returned. . . . This year my husband published in the Contemporary" two articles on "two articles on "Knowing and Feeling," and wrote two papers for " Blackwood's Magazine.” One of these was upon Dr. Noah Porter's work on the "Human Intellect," for which he had, and expressed, high appreciation, and which generally lay upon his writing-table. I need hardly say that he also read much. What and how he read shall be described in words of his own, written long years before, and true to the end : "The books of a speculative man lie open quite tranquilly before him, the page turns slowly- they are the |