ve read,
as I have been by yours.

Your faithful Servant.

[Sidenote: The same.]

3, ALBION VILLAS, FOLKESTONE, _July 21st, 1855._

DEAR MADAM,

I did not enter, in detail, on the spirit of the alteration I propose in
your story; because I thought it right that you should think out that
for yourself if you applied yourself to the change. I can now assure you
that you describe it exactly as I had conceived it; and if I had wanted
anything to confirm me in my conviction of its being right, our both
seeing it so precisely from the same point of view, would be ample
assurance to me.

I would leave her new and altered life to be inferred. It does not
appear to me either necessary or practicable (within such limits) to do
more than that. Do not be uneasy if you find the alteration demanding
time. I shall quite understand that, and my interest will keep. _When_
you finish the story, send it to Mr. Wills. Besides being in daily
communication with him, I am at the office once a week; and I will go
over it in print, before the proof is sent to you.

Very faithfully yours.

1855.[63]

[Sidenote: Captain Morgan.]

DEAR FRIEND,[64]

I am always delighted to hear from you. Your genial earnestness does me
good to think of. And every day of my life I feel more and more that to
be thoroughly in earnest is everything, and to be anything short of it
is nothing. You see what we have been doing to our valiant soldiers.[65]
You see what miserable humbugs we are. And because we have got involved
in meshes of aristocratic red tape to our unspeakable confusion, loss,
and sorrow, the gentlemen who have been so kind as to ruin us are going
to give us a day of humiliation and fasting the day after to-morrow. I
am sick and sour to think of such things at this age of the world. . . .
I am in the first stage of a new book, which consists in going round and
round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about and about his
sugar before he touches it.

Always most cordially yours.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] The Editors have great pleasure in publishing another note to Mr.
Thackeray, which has been found and sent to them by his daughter, Mrs.
Ritchie, since the publication of the first two volumes.

[58] Chairman of the