the surface of my flannel waistcoat.

This is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff,
whereon--in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay--our house stands; the
sea rolling and dashing under the windows. Seven miles out are the
Goodwin Sands (you've heard of the Goodwin Sands?) whence floating
lights perpetually wink after dark, as if they were carrying on
intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big lighthouse called the
North Foreland on a hill behind the village, a severe parsonic light,
which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and stares grimly out upon
the sea. Under the cliff are rare good sands, where all the children
assemble every morning and throw up impossible fortifications, which the
sea throws down again at high water. Old gentlemen and ancient ladies
flirt after their own manner in two reading-rooms and on a great many
scattered seats in the open air. Other old gentlemen look all day
through telescopes and never see anything. In a bay-window in a one-pair
sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no
neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny
indeed. His name is Boz. At one he disappears, and presently emerges
from a bathing-machine, and may be seen--a kind of salmon-coloured
porpoise--splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be seen in
another bay-window on the ground-floor, eating a strong lunch; after
that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand
reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be
talked to; and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as
a berry, and they _do_ say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells
beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. Sometimes he goes up to
London (eighty miles, or so, away), and then I'm told there is a sound
in Lincoln's Inn Fields at night, as of men laughing, together with a
clinking of knives and forks and wine-glasses.

I never shall have been so near you since we parted aboard the _George
Washington_ as next Tuesday. Forster, Maclise, and I, and perhaps
Stanfield, are then going aboard the Cunard steamer at Liverpool, to bid
Macready good-bye, and bring his wife away. It will be a very hard
parting. You will see and know him of course. We gave him a splendid
dinner last Saturday at Richmond, whereat I presided with my accustomed
grace. He is one of the noblest fellows in the world, and I would give a