ader finishes Cake and Porter: and we now adjourn to 'All the Year
Round.')

10 p.m. 'All the Year Round' read--part of it--and Reader departed.

Pray do tell me if any one reads Crabbe in America; nobody does here, you
know, but myself; who bore about it. Does Mrs. Wister, who reads many
things? Does Mrs. Kemble, now she has the Atlantic between her and the
old Country?

'Over the Forth I look to the North,
But what is the North and its Hielands to me?
The North and the East gie small ease to my breast,
The far foreign land and the wide rolling Sea.' {37}

I think that last line will bring the Tears into Mrs. Kemble's Eyes--which
I can't find in the Photograph she sent me. Yet they are not
extinguisht, surely?

I read in some Athenaeum that A. Tennyson was changing his Publisher
again: and some one told me that it was in consequence of the resigning
Publisher having lost money by his contract with the Poet; which was, to
pay him 1000 pounds per Quarter for the exclusive sale of his Poems. It
was a Woodbridge _Literati_ who told me this, having read it in a Paper
called 'The Publisher.' More I know not.

A little more such stuff I might write: but I think here is enough of it.
For this Night, anyhow: so I shall lick the Ink from my Pen; and smoke
one Pipe, not forgetting you while I do so; and if nothing turns up To-
morrow, here is my Letter done, and I remaining yours always sincerely

E. F.G.

XV.

WOODBRIDGE: _Nov._ 24, [1873].

DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,

A note from Mowbray to-day says 'I think I can report the Father really
on the road to recovery.'

So, as I think you will be as glad to know this as I am, I write again
over the Atlantic. And, after all, you mayn't be over the Atlantic, but
in London itself! Donne would have told me: but I don't like to trouble
him with Questions, or writing of any sort. If you be in London, you
will hear somehow of all this matter: if in America, my Letter won't go
in vain.

Mowbray wrote me some while ago of the Death of your Sister's Son in the
Hunting-field. {38} Mowbray said, aged thirty, I think: I had no idea,
so old: born when I was with Thackeray in Coram Street--(_Jorum_ Street,
he called it) where I remember Mrs. Sartoris coming in her Brougham to
bid him to Dinner, 1843.

I wrote to Annie Thackeray yesterday: politely telling her I couldn't
relish her Old Kensington a quarter as much as her Village on the Cliff:
which, ho