ed enough to pull up the blind and open the window
some green leaves fluttered in in the delicious breeze. I went off
into raptures, thinking it was a big _Vine_ I had not noticed before,
creeping outside!!

It was a maypole of sycamore branches, placed there by the
Foresters!!!

Frances Peard laughed at me much for something like to this I said at
Torquay! She said, "You are just like my old mother. Whenever we pass
a man who has used a fusee, she always becomes knowing about tobacco,
and says, _There_, Frances, my dear--there IS a fine cigar.'"

* * * * *

... We came here last Thursday. When I got to Porton D. had sent an
air-cushion in the fly, and though I had a five miles drive it was
through this exquisite air on a calm, lovely evening, and by the time
we got to a spot on the Downs where a little Pinewood breaks the
expanse of the plains, the good-humoured driver and I were both on our
knees on the grass digging up plots of the exquisite Shepherd's Thyme,
which carpets the place with blue!

Yesterday we drove by Stonehenge to Winterbourne Stoke. It was
glaring, and I could not do much sketching, but the drive over the
downs was like drinking in life at some primeval spring. (And this
though the wind did give me acute neuralgia in my right eye, but yet
the air was so exquisitely refreshing that I could cover my eye with a
handkerchief and still enjoy!) The charm of these unhedged, unbounded,
un-"cabined, cribbed, confined" _prairies_ is all their own, and very
perfect! And _such_ flowers _enamel_ (it _is_ a good simile in spite
of Alphonse Karr!) the close fine grass! The pale-yellow rock cistus
in clumps, the blue "shepherd's thyme" in tracts of colour, sweet
little purple-capped orchids, spireas and burnets, and everywhere "the
golden buttercup" in sheets of gleaming yellow, and the soft wind
blows and blows, and the black-nosed sheep come up the leas, and I
drink in the breeze! Oh, those flocks of black-faced lambs and sheep
are TOO-TOO! and I must tell you that the old Wiltshire
"ship-dog" is nearly extinct. I regret to say that he is not found
equal to "the Scotch" in business habits, and one see Collies
everywhere now....

_London._ June 29, 1882.

* * * * *

I had a great treat last Sunday. One you and I will share when you
come home. D., U., and I took Jack to church at the Chelsea Hospital,
and we went round the Pensioners' Rooms