sh with me, that some coppery,
tough old savage'll eat him for his investigating pains! If anything
can cure her infatuation, one would think this last stroke of barbarity
might, and perhaps then there would be some hope for the singer lover,
who has taken care of her, shared her grief--borne all the burden that
the miserable new Rousseau refused.

The food-reforming trio are gone from the associate household. "The
Food-Regenerator" has not the circulation it deserves. Its editor threw
up a secretaryship that was profitable, but cramping to a soaring,
unmercenary spirit. So the emoluments of the journal were insufficient
for the club life, and they've retired to a poor lodging where that
weary white cat, I suppose, is trying to keep the heroic little man and
all her hungry progeny--ravens, I of course meant to say, only I'd
called their mother a cat!--on broad beans and porridge and next to
nothing a week, and do the work of an office-boy besides!

The third member of the trio, the young girl who told me she was to be
a "healer," has had a sad fate. She had, it seems, some liabilities to
lung disease which she determined to starve out; so the great rations
of bran bread and prunes, which distressed Ronayne at the dinner-party,
dwindled, months ago, to two or three ounces of bread daily, and a
little fruit--the quantity becoming so small that her mother piteously
declared they could not understand how she lived at all.

Reducing her food day by day, she went, in June, to Aberystwith for
some weeks. While there, she fell asleep while reading one afternoon in
a cave on the coast, and when she wakened it was night, the rain
falling heavily, the tide risen so that all egress from the cave was
cut off, and she a prisoner. At that season of the year there was no
danger beyond that of fright and exposure to damp and chill so many
hours; for the water only rises high in the cave during great storms;
but even if she had been told this, who remembers or reasons clearly in
such sudden, awful moments? But she came out so soon as morning and the
ebbing water released her, walked the two or three miles back to her
lodging, told her story with apparent calmness, and before night was a
raving maniac, so wild and uncontrollable that her family were obliged
to place her in a lunatic asylum, and as yet there is nothing favorable
to report in her case.

Mrs. Stainton still at Bournemouth, but writing often either to Miss
Hedges or to me