'PAG.'

TO MISS CHARLOTTE BRONTE

'WELLINGTON, N. Z., _April_ 3_rd_, 1850.

'DEAR CHARLOTTE,--About a week since I received your last melancholy
letter with the account of Anne's death and your utter indifference
to everything, even to the success of your last book. Though you do
not say this, it is pretty plain to be seen from the style of your
letter. It seems to me hard indeed that you who would succeed,
better than any one, in making friends and keeping them, should be
condemned to solitude from your poverty. To no one would money bring
more happiness, for no one would use it better than you would. For
me, with my headlong self-indulgent habits, I am perhaps better
without it, but I am convinced it would give you great and noble
pleasures. Look out then for success in writing; you ought to care
as much for that as you do for going to Heaven. Though the
advantages of being employed appear to you now the best part of the
business, you will soon, please God, have other enjoyments from your
success. Railway shares will rise, your books will sell, and you
will acquire influence and power; and then most certainly you will
find something to use it in which will interest you and make you
exert yourself.

'I have got into a heap of social trickery since Ellen came, never
having troubled my head before about the comparative numbers of young
ladies and young gentlemen. To Ellen it is quite new to be of such
importance by the mere fact of her femininity. She thought she was
coming wofully down in the world when she came out, and finds herself
better received than ever she was in her life before. And the class
are not _in education_ inferior, though they are in money. They are
decent well-to-do people: six grocers, one draper, two parsons, two
clerks, two lawyers, and three or four nondescripts. All these but
one have families to "take tea with," and there are a lot more single
men to flirt with. For the last three months we have been out every
Sunday sketching. We seldom succeed in making the slightest
resemblance to the thing we sit down to, but it is wonderfully
interesting. Next year we hope to send a lot home. With all this my
novel stands still; it might h