rk lake.

Please say "John Inglesant" is harder than real history and of no
mortal use. I couldn't read four pages of it. Clever, of course.

* * * * *

HERNE HILL, _14th August, 1880_.

I've _just_ finished my Scott paper:[28] but it has retouchings and
notings yet to do. I couldn't write a word before; haven't so much as
a syllable to Diddie, and only a move at chess to Macdonald, for, you
know, to keep a chess player waiting for a move is like keeping St.
Lawrence unturned.

[Footnote 28: "Fiction Fair and Foul", No. 3.]

* * * * *

_21st August, 1880._

I'm leaving to-day for Dover, and a line from you to-morrow or Monday
would find me certainly at Poste Restante, Abbeville.

I have not been working at all, but enjoying myself (only that takes
up time all the same) at Crystal Palace concerts, and jugglings, and
at Zoological Gardens, where I had a snake seven feet long to play
with, only I hadn't much time to make friends, and it rather wanted to
get away all the time. And I gave the hippopotamus _whole_ buns, and
he was delighted, and saw the cormorant catch fish thrown to him six
yards off; never missed one; you would have thought the fish ran along
a wire up to him and down his throat. And I saw the penguin swim under
water, and the sea lions sit up, four of them on four wooden chairs,
and catch fish also; but they missed sometimes and had to flop off
their chairs into the water and then flop out again and flop up
again.

And I lunched with Cardinal Manning, and he gave me _such_ a
plum pie. I never tasted a Protestant pie to touch it.

* * * * *

Now you're just wrong about my darling Cardinal. See what it is to be
jealous! He gave me lovely soup, roast beef, hare and currant jelly,
puff pastry like Papal pretensions--you had but to breathe on it and
it was nowhere--raisins and almonds, and those lovely preserved
cherries like kisses kept in amber. And told me delicious stories all
through lunch. _There_!

And we really do see the sun here! And last night the sky was all a
spangle and delicate glitter of stars, the glare of them and spikiness
softened off by a young darling of a moon.

* * * * *

AMIENS, _29th August, 1880_.

You have been made happy doubtless with us by the news from Her