gether if I begin to write to
you as 'at these presents.' But I want to know how you both are, and
if your last account may continue to be considered the true one. You
have been poising yourself on the equal balance of letters, as weak
consciences are apt to do, but I write that you may write, and also,
a little, that I may thank you for the kindness of your last letter,
which was so very kind.

No, indeed, dearest Mrs. Martin. If I do not say oftener that I have
a strong and grateful trust in your affection for me, and therefore
in your interest in all that concerns me, it is not that it is less
strong and grateful. What I said or sang of Miss Martineau's letter
was no consequence of a distrust of _you_, but of a feeling within
myself that for me to show about such a letter was scarcely becoming,
and, in the matter of modesty, nowise discreet. I suppose I was
writing excuses to myself for showing it to you. I cannot otherwise
account for the saying and singing. And, for the rest, nobody can say
or sing that I am not frank enough to you--to the extent of telling
all manner of nonsense about myself which can only be supposed to be
interesting on the ground of your being presupposed to care a little
for the person concerned. Now am I not frank enough? And by the way, I
send you 'The Seraphim'[127] at last, by this day's railroad.

Thursday.

To prove to you that I had not forgotten you before your letter came,
here is the fragment of an unfinished one which I send you, to begin
with--an imperfect fossil letter, which no comparative anatomy will
bring much sense out of--except the plain fact _that you were not
forgotten_....

From Alexandria we heard yesterday that they sailed from thence on the
first of January, and the home passage may be long.

The _changes_ in Mary Minto on account of mesmerism were merely
imaginary as far as I can understand. Nobody here observed any change
in her. Oh no. These things will be fancied sometimes. That she is an
enthusiastic girl, and that the subject took strong hold upon her, is
true enough, and not the least in the world--according to my mind--to
be wondered at. By the way, I had a letter and the present of a work
on mesmerism--Mr. Newnham's--from his daughter, who sent it to me the
other day, in the kindest way, 'out of gratitude for my poetry,' as
she says, and from a desire that it might do me physical good in the
matter of health. I do not at all know her. I wrote to thank h