left the India House and gone into the Fishmongers'
Almshouses over the bridge. I have a little cabin there, small and
homely; but you shall be welcome to it. You like oysters, and to open
them yourself; I'll get you some if you come in oyster time. Marshall,
Godwin's old friend, is still alive, and talks of the faces you used
to make. [1]

Come as soon as you can.

C. LAMB.

[1] The reversal of this serio-humorous mingling of fiction and forecast
will be found in the next letter.

LIX.

TO MANNING.

_December_ 26, 1815.

Dear Manning,--Following your brother's example, I have just ventured
one letter to Canton, and am now hazarding another (not exactly a
duplicate) to St. Helena. The first was full of unprobable romantic
fictions, fitting the remoteness of the mission it goes upon; in the
present I mean to confine myself nearer to truth as you come nearer
home. A correspondence with the uttermost parts of the earth necessarily
involves in it some heat of fancy; it sets the brain agoing; but I can
think on the half-way house tranquilly. Your friends, then, are not all
dead or grown forgetful of you through old age,--as that lying letter
asserted, anticipating rather what must happen if you keep tarrying on
forever on the skirts of creation, as there seemed a danger of your
doing,--but they are all tolerably well, and in full and perfect
comprehension of what is meant by Manning's coming home again. Mrs.
Kenney never let her tongue run riot more than in remembrances of you.
Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her
romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried
in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a
bran-new gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me,
almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to _leave
off tobacco!_ Surely there must be some other world in which this
unconquerable purpose shall be realized. The soul hath not her generous
aspirings implanted in her in vain. One that you knew, and I think the
only one of those friends we knew much of in common, has died in
earnest. Poor Priscilla! Her brother Robert is also dead, and several of
the grown-up brothers and sisters, in the compass of a very few years.
Death has not otherwise meddled much in families that I know. Not but he
has his horrid eye upon us, and is whetting his infernal feathered dart
every instant, as you see him tru