I'm a little better, but can't laugh much yet, and won't cry if I can
help it. Yet it always makes me _nearly_ cry, to hear of those poor
working men trying to express themselves and nobody ever teaching
them, nor anybody in all England, knowing that painting is an _art_,
and sculpture also, and that an untaught man can no more carve or
paint, than play the fiddle. All efforts of the kind, mean simply that
we have neither master nor scholars in any rank or any place. And I,
also, what have _I_ done for Coniston schools yet! I don't deserve an
oyster shell, far less an oyster.

* * * * *

KIRBY LONSDALE,
_Thursday evening_.

You won't get this note to-morrow, I'm afraid, but after that I think
they will be regular till I reach Oxford. It is very nice to know that
there is some one who does care for a letter, as if she were one's
sister. You would be glad to see the clouds break for me; and I had
indeed a very lovely morning drive and still lovelier evening, and
full moonrise here over the Lune.

I suppose it is Kirk-by-Lune's Dale? for the church, I find, is a very
important Norman relic. By the way, I should tell you, that the
_colored_ plates in the "Stones of Venice" do great injustice to my
drawings; the patches are worn on the stones. My _drawings_ were not
_good_, but the plates are total failures. The only one even of the
engravings, which is rightly done is the (_last_, I think, in
Appendix) inlaid dove and raven. I'll show you the drawing for that
when I come back, and perhaps for the San Michele, if I recollect to
fetch it from Oxford, and I'll fetch you the second volume, which has
really good plates. That blue beginning, I forgot to say, is of the
Straits of Messina, and it is really _very_ like the color of the sea.

That is intensely curious about the parasitical plant of Borneo.
But--very dreadful!

* * * * *

You are like Timon of Athens, and I'm like one of his parasites. The
oranges are delicious, the brown bread dainty; what the melon is going
to be I have no imagination to tell. But, oh me, I had such a lovely
letter from Dr. John, sent me from Joan this morning, and I've lost
it. It said, "Is Susie as good as her letters? If so, she must be
better. What freshness of enjoyment in everything she says!"

Alas! not in everything she feels in _this_ wea