e decay of the best year I have ever
lived through, and am your very middle-aged faithful and true.

LETTER XLVIII.

Dearest: If anybody has been "calling me names" that are not mine, they do
me a fine injury, and you did well to purge the text of their abuse. I
agree with no authority, however immortal, which inquires "What's in a
name?" expecting the answer to be a snap of the fingers. I answer with a
snap of temper that the blood, boots, and bones of my ancestors are in
mine! Do you suppose I could have been the same woman had such names as
Amelia or Bella or Cinderella been clinging leechlike to my consciousness
through all the years of my training? Why, there are names I can think of
which would have made me break down into side-ringlets had I been forced
to wear them audibly.

The effect is not so absolute when it is a second name that can be tucked
away if unpresentable, but even then it is a misfortune. There is C----,
now, who won't marry, I believe, chiefly because of the insane "Annie"
with which she was smitten at the baptismal font by an afterthought. She
regards it as a taint in her constitution which orders her to a lonely
life lest worse might follow. And apply the consideration more publicly:
do you imagine the Prince of Wales will be the same sort of king if, when
he comes to the throne, he calls himself King Albert Edward in florid
Continental fashion, instead of "Edward the Seventh," with a right hope
that an Edward the Eighth may follow after him, to make a neck-and-neck
race of it with the Henries? I don't know anything that would do more to
knit up the English constitution: but whenever I pass the Albert Memorial
I tremble lest filial piety will not allow the thing to be done.

Now of all this I had an instance in the village the day before yesterday.
At the corner house by the post-office, as I went by, a bird opened his
bill and sang a note, and down, down, down, down he went over a golden
scale: pitched afresh, and dropped down another; and then up, up, up, over
the range of both. Then he flung back his shaggy head and laughed. "In all
my father's realm there are no such bells as these!" It was the laughing
jackass. "Who gave you your name?" "My godfathers and my godmothers in my
baptism." Well, _his_ will have _that_ to answer for, however safely for
the rest he may have eschewed the world, the flesh, and the devil. Poor
bird, to be set to sing to us under such a burden:--of which, u