ide of the door
yesterday, and some one's took it."

There is yet a later widow, but I do _not_ think of taking her into
the house. The Widow Bone has taken to _boning_ her daughter's
clothes, so _she_ is forbidden the house....

To A.E.

_Brighton_. April 17, 1872.

... I got here all right, and wonderfully little tired, though the
train shook a good deal the latter part of the way.

Oh! the FLOWERS! The cowslips, the purple orchids, the kingcups, the
primroses! And the grey, drifting cumuli with gaps of blue, and the
cinnamon and purple woods, broken with yellowish poplars and pale
willows, with red farms, and yellow gorse lighted up by the sun!!! The
oaks just beginning to break out in yellowish tufts, [_Sketch._] I
can't tell you what lovely sketches I passed between Aldershot and
Redhill!

On to Brighton I took charge of a small boy being sent by a fond
mother to school. When I mention that he was nine years old,--and
informed me--that he had got "a jolly book," which proved to be _A
School for Fathers_, that his own school wasn't _much of a one_, and
he was going to leave, and ate hard-boiled eggs and crystallized
oranges by the way--you will see how this generation waxes apace!!

_Ecclesfield_. May 27, 1872.

... The weather is very nice now. I stayed till the end of the Litany
in church yesterday, and then slipped out by the organ door and sat
with Mother. I sat on the Boy's school side of the chancel, where a
little lad near me was singing _alto_ (not a "second" of thirds!)
strong and steady as a thrush in a hedge!! The music went very well.

The country looks lovely, _but for the smoke_. If it had but our blue
distance it would be grand. But the

"wreathed smoke afar
That o'er the town like mist upraised
Hung, hiding sun and star,"

gets worse every year! And when I think of our lovely blue and grey
folds of distance, and bright skies, and tints, I feel quite
_Ruskinish_ towards mills and manufactories.

TO C.T. GATTY.

_X Lines, South Camp, Aldershot._
August 10, 1873.

MY VERY DEAR OLD CHARLIE,

Don't you suppose your sister is forgetting you. Two causes have
delayed your drawings.

1. I have been working--oh _so_ hard! It was because Mr. Bell
announced that he wanted a "volume," and that for the Xmas Market one
must begin at once in July!

Such is competition!

He had an idea that something which had not appeared in any magazine
would be more