d yet such a mastery of the
instrument. Her _rippling_ passages are like music writ in water, and
she has a singing touch too, and when she accompanies, the
subordination and sympathy are admirable. She is not pretty, nor in
any way got up, but is elfish and quaint-looking, and quite young. We
sat quite near to Browning, who is a nice-looking old man,
delightfully _clean_. He seemed to delight in Neruda and Piatti, and
followed the music with a score of his own.

_Ecclesfield._ Saturday, January 31, 1880.

How beautiful a day is to-day I cannot tell you! It does refresh
me!... Head and spine very shaky this morning so that I could not get
warm; but I wrapped in my fur cloak, and went out into the sunshine,
up and down, up and down the churchyard flags. A sunny old kirkyard is
a nice place, I always think, for aged folk and invalids to creep up
and down in, and "Tombstone Morality" isn't half as wearing to the
nerves as the problems of _life_!...

* * * * *

_Greno House_, Tuesday.

Harry Howard drove me up yesterday. It was _just_ as much as I could
bear; but I lay on the sofa till dinner, and went to bed at eight, and
though my head kept me awake at first, I did well on the whole.
Breakfast in bed, a bigger one than I have eaten for three weeks, and
since then I have had an hour's drive. The roughness of the roads is
unlucky, but the air _divine_! Such sweet sunshine, and Greno Wood,
with yellow remains of bush and bracken, and heavy mosses on the
sandstone walls, and tiny streams trickling through boggy bits of the
wood, and coming out over the wall to overflow those picturesque stone
troughs which are so oddly numerous, and which I had in my head when I
wrote the first part of "Mrs. Overtheway."

* * * * *

January 11, 1880.

* * * * *

Very dear to me are all your "tender and true" regards for the old
home--the grey-green nest (more grey now than green!) a good deal
changed and weatherbeaten, but not quite deserted--which is bound up
with so much of our lives! It is one of the points on which we feel
very much alike, our love for things, and places, and beasts!!!
Another chord of sympathy was very strongly pulled by your writing of
the "grey-green fields," and sending your love to them. No one I ever
met has, I think, _quite_ your sympathy with exactly what the external
world of out-of-doors is to me