ur kind,
considerate proposal, and that it is not made in vain for my wishes,
and that I am not likely willingly 'to spend two or three days' with
anybody in the world before I do so with yourself.

Mr. Hunter has not paid us his usual Saturday's visit, and therefore
I have no means of answering the questions you put in relation to him.
We will ask him about 'times and seasons' when next we see him, and
you shall hear.

Did you ever hear much of Robert Montgomery, commonly called Satan
Montgomery because the author of 'Satan,' of the 'Omnipresence of the
Deity,' and of various poems which pass through edition after
edition, nobody knows how or _why_? I understand that his pew (he is
a clergyman) is sown over with red rosebuds from ladies of the
congregation, and that the same fair hands have made and presented to
him, in the course of a single season, one hundred pairs of slippers.
Whereupon somebody said to this Reverend Satan, 'I never knew before,
Mr. Montgomery, that you were a _centipede_'

Dearest Mr. Boyd's affectionate and grateful
ELIBET.

Through the summer of 1845, Miss Barrett, as usual, recovered
strength, but so slightly that her doctor urged that she should not
face the winter in England. Plans were accordingly made for her
going abroad, to which the following letters refer, but the scheme
ultimately broke down before the prohibition of Mr. Barrett--a
prohibition for which no valid reason was put forward, and which, to
say the least, bore the colour of unaccountable indifference to his
daughter's health and wishes. The matter is of some importance on
account of its bearing on the action taken by Miss Barrett in the
autumn of the following year.

_To Mrs. Martin_
Monday, July 29, 1845 [postmark].

My dearest Mrs. Martin,--I am ashamed not to have written before, and
yet have courage enough to ask you to write to me as soon as you
can. Day by day I have had good intentions enough (the fact is)
about writing, to seem to deserve some good deeds from you, which
is contrary to all wisdom and reason, I know, but is rather natural,
after all. What _my_ deeds have been, you will be apt to ask. Why, all
manner of idleness, which is the most interrupting, you know, of
all things. The Hedleys have been flitting backwards and forwards,
staying, some of them, for a month at a time in London, and then
going, and then coming again; and I have had other visitors, few but
engrossing 'after their kind.' And I