they should express
themselves, by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story
of incident might be written, in place of the bestiality that _is_
written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own
mortar, and beating their own interests out of them. If you could have
read the story all at once, I hope you wouldn't have stopped halfway.

As to coming to your retreat, my dear Forster, think how helpless I am.
I am not well yet. I have an instinctive feeling that nothing but the
sea will restore me, and I am planning to go and work at Ballard's, at
Broadstairs, from next Wednesday to Monday. I generally go to town on
Monday afternoon. All Tuesday I am at the office, on Wednesday I come
back here, and go to work again. I don't leave off till Monday comes
round once more. I am fighting to get my story done by the first week in
October. On the 10th of October I am going away to read for a fortnight
at Ipswich, Norwich, Oxford, Cambridge, and a few other places. Judge
what my spare time is just now!

I am very much surprised and very sorry to find from the enclosed that
Elliotson has been ill. I never heard a word of it.

Georgy sends best love to you and to Mrs. Forster, so do I, so does
Plorn, so does Frank. The girls are, for five days, with the Whites at
Ramsgate. It is raining, intensely hot, and stormy. Eighteen creatures,
like little tortoises, have dashed in at the window and fallen on the
paper since I began this paragraph [Illustration: ink-blot] (that was
one!). I am a wretched sort of creature in my way, but it is a way that
gets on somehow. And all ways have the same fingerpost at the head of
them, and at every turning in them.

Ever affectionately.

[Sidenote: Miss Dickens and Miss Katie Dickens.]

ALBION, BROADSTAIRS, _Friday, Sept. 2nd, 1859._

MY DEAREST MAMIE AND KATIE,

I have been "moved" here, and am now (Ballard having added to the hotel
a house we lived in three years) in our old dining-room and
sitting-room, and our old drawing-room as a bedroom. My cold is so bad,
both in my throat and in my chest, that I can't bathe in the sea; Tom
Collin dissuaded me--thought it "bad"--but I get a heavy shower-bath at
Mrs. Crampton's every morning. The baths are still hers and her
husband's, but they have retired and live in "Nuckells"--are going to
give a stained-glass window, value three hundred pounds,