nd all admire your choice! I was determined they should. I
have been collecting scalps for you to hang at your girdle. All thought
me beautiful: people who never did so before. I wanted to say to them,
"Am I not beautiful? I am, am I not?" And it was not for myself I was
asking this praise. Beloved, I was wearing the magic rose--what you gave
me when we parted: you saying, alas, that you were not to be there. But
you _were_! Its leaves have not dropped nor the scent of it faded. I
kiss you out of the heart of it. Good-night: come to me in my first
dream!

LETTER XII.

Dearest: It has been such a funny day from post-time onwards:--
congratulations on the great event are beginning to arrive in envelopes
and on wheels. Some are very kind and dear; and some are not so--only the
ordinary seemliness of polite sniffle-snaffle. Just after you had gone
yesterday, Mrs. ---- called and was told the news. Of course she knew _of_
you: but didn't think she had ever seen you. "Probably he passed you at
the gates," I said. "What?" she went off with a view-hallo; "that
well-dressed sort of young fellow in gray, and a mustache, and knowing how
to ride? Met us in the lane. _Well_, my dear, I _do_ congratulate you!"

And whether it was by the gray suit, or the mustache, or the knowing how
to ride that her congratulations were so emphatically secured, I know not!

Others are yet more quaint, and more to my liking. Nan-nan is Nan-nan: I
cannot let you off what she said! No tears or sentiment came from her
to prevent me laughing: she brisked like an old war-horse at the first
word of it, and blessed God that it had come betimes, that she might be
a nurse again in her old age! She is a true "Mrs. Berry," and is ready
to make room for you in my affections for the sake of far-off divine
events, which promise renewed youth to her old bones.

Roberts, when he brought me my pony this morning, touched his hat quick
twice over to show that the news brimmed in his body: and a very nice
cordial way of showing, I thought it! He was quite ready to talk when I
let him go; and he gave me plenty of good fun. He used to know you when
he was in service at the H----s, and speaks of you as being then "a
gallous young hound," whatever that may mean. I imagine "gallous" to be
a rustic Lewis Carroll compound, made up in equal parts of callousness
and gallantry, which most boys are, at some stage of their existence.

What tales will you be getting of m