mankind. Yet I could not
attend to it, read out by the most beloved voice. But your eyes do not
get worse, I gather. Oh, for the collyrium of Tobias enclosed in a
whiting's liver, to send you, with no apocryphal good wishes! The last
long time I heard from you, you had knocked your head against something.
Do not do so; for your head (I do not flatter) is not a knob, or the top
of a brass nail, or the end of a ninepin,--unless a Vulcanian hammer
could fairly batter a "Recluse" out of it; then would I bid the smirched
god knock, and knock lustily, the two-handed skinker! Mary must squeeze
out a line _propria manu_; but indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly
nervous to letter-writing for a long interval. 'T will please you all to
hear that, though I fret like a lion in a net, her present health and
spirits are better than they have been for some time past; she is
absolutely three years and a half younger, as I tell her, since we have
adopted this boarding plan.

Our providers are an honest pair, Dame Westwood and her husband,--he,
when the light of prosperity shined on them, a moderately thriving
haberdasher within Bow bells, retired since with something under a
competence; writes himself parcel-gentleman; hath borne parish offices;
sings fine old sea-songs at threescore and ten; sighs only now and then
when he thinks that he has a son on his hands about fifteen, whom he
finds a difficulty in getting out into the world, and then checks a sigh
with muttering, as I once heard him prettily, not meaning to be heard,
"I have married my daughter, however;" takes the weather as it comes;
outsides it to town in severest season; and o' winter nights tells old
stories not tending to literature (how comfortable to author-rid
folks!), and has _one ancedote_, upon which and about forty pounds a
year he seems to have retired in green old age. It was how he was a
rider in his youth, travelling for shops, and once (not to balk his
employer's bargain) on a sweltering day in August, rode foaming into
Dunstable [1] upon a mad horse, to the dismay and expostulatory
wonderment of inn-keepers, ostlers, etc., who declared they would not
have bestrid the beast to win the Derby. Understand the creature galled
to death and desperation by gad-flies, cormorant-winged, worse than
beset Inachus's daughter. This he tells, this he brindles and burnishes,
on a winter's eve; 't is his star of set glory, his rejuvenescence to
descant upon, Far from me b