ust,
nevertheless, destroy or be destroyed by the other; a very pretty
vegetable version of the ancient classical, family fate,
superstitions....

Pray, if you know how flowers propagate, write me word. In gathering
primroses this morning, Lady ---- and I exercised our ignorance in all
sorts of conjectures upon the subject, neither of us being botanists,
though she knew, which I did not, the male from the female flowers.

I get a good deal of sleep since you have gone away, as I certainly do
not sit up talking half the night with anybody else. But as for enough,
is there such a thing as enough sleep? and was anybody ever known to
have had it? and who was he or she?

I have had two long letters from Elizabeth Sedgwick, containing much
matter about the abolitionists, in whose movements, you know, she is
deeply interested; also more urgent entreaties that I will "use my
influence" to secure our return home in the autumn!...

My father appears to be quite well, and in a state of great pleasurable
excitement and activity of mind, having (alas! I regret to say) accepted
once more the management of Covent Garden, which is too long a story to
begin just at the end of my paper; but he is in the theatre from morning
till night, as happy as the gods, and apparently, just now, as free from
all mortal infirmity. It is amazing, to be sure, what the revival of the
one interest of his life has done for his health.

I went to the Portland Street Chapel last Sunday, and heard a sermon
upon my peculiar virtue, _humility_, not from the same clergyman we
heard together; and S----, who is too funny, sang the Psalms so loud
that I had to remonstrate with her.

Ever yours,
F. A. B.

[A horrible murder had just been committed by a miserable man of the
name of Good, who endeavored to conceal his crime by cutting to
pieces and scattering in different directions the mangled remains of
his victim--a woman. The details of these horrors filled the public
papers, and were the incessant subject of discussion in society, and
were calculated to produce an impression of terror difficult to
shake off even by so little nervous a person as myself.

The Countess of Berkeley, to whom I have alluded in this letter, was
a woman whose story was a singular romance, which now may be said to
belong to "ancient history." She w