or love this book. Does Mr. Martin? Do _you_?

Henrietta would send her love to you if I could hear her voice nearer
than I do actually, as she sings to the guitar downstairs. And her
love is not the only one to be sent. Give mine to dear Mr. Martin,
though he can't make up his mind to the bore of writing to me. And
remember us all, both of you, as we do you.

Dearest Mrs. Martin, your affectionate BA.

_To James Martin_
February 6, 1843.

You make us out, my dear Mr. Martin, to be such perfect parallel lines
that I should be half afraid of completing the definition by our never
meeting, if it were not for what you say afterwards, of the coming
to London, and of promising to come and see Flush. If you should be
travelling while I am writing, it was only what happened to me when I
wrote not long ago to dearest Mrs. Martin, and everybody in this house
cried out against the fatuity of the coincidence. As if I could know
that she was travelling, when nobody told me, and I wasn't a witch!
If the same thing happens to-day, believe in the innocence of my
ignorance. I shall be consoled if it does--for certain reasons. But
for none in the world can I help thanking you for your letter, which
gave me so much pleasure from the first sight of the handwriting to
the thought of the kindness spent upon me in it, that after all I
cannot thank you as I would.

Yet I won't let you fancy me of such an irrational state of simplicity
as not to be fully aware that _you_, with your 'nature of the fields
and forests,' look down disdainfully and with an inward heat of
glorying, upon _me_ who have all my pastime in books--dead and
seethed. Perhaps, if it were a little warmer, I might even grant that
you are right in your pride. As it is, I grumble feebly to myself
something about the definition of _nature_, and how we in the town
(which 'God made' just as He made your hedges) have _our_ share
of nature too; and then I have secret thoughts of the state of the
thermometer, and wonder how people can breathe out of doors. In the
meantime, Flush, who is a better philosopher, pushes deep into
my furs, and goes to sleep. Perhaps I should fear the omen for my
correspondent.

Oh yes! That picture in 'Boz' is beautiful. For my own part, and by a
natural womanly contradiction, I have never cared so much in my life
for flowers as since being shut out from gardens--unless, indeed, in
the happy days of old when I had a garden of my own, and cut it o