_drops_, it will not be
for weariness nor even for weakness, but because it is cut off at the
shoulder. _I_ will not fail to you,--may God so deal with me, so bless
me, so leave me, as I live only for you and _shall_. Do you doubt
_that_, my only beloved! Ah, you know well--_too well_, people would
say ... but I do not think it 'too well' myself, ... knowing _you_.

Your

BA.

Here is a gossip which Mr. Kenyon brought me on Sunday--disbelieving
it himself, he asseverated, though Lady Chantrey said it 'with
authority,'--that Mr. Harness had offered his hand heart and
ecclesiastical dignities to Miss Burdett Coutts. It is Lady Chantrey's
and Mr. Kenyon's _secret_, remember.

And ... will you tell me? How can a man spend four or five successive
months on the sea, most cheaply--at the least pecuniary expense, I
mean? Because Miss Mitford's friend Mr. Buckingham is ordered by his
medical adviser to complete his cure by these means; and he is not
rich. Could he go with sufficient comfort by a merchant's vessel to
the Mediterranean ... and might he drift about among the Greek
islands?

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday.

'Out of window' would be well, as I see the leap, if it ended (_so far
as I am concerned_) in the worst way imaginable--I would I 'run the
risk' (Ba's other word) rationally, deliberately,--knowing what the
ordinary law of chances in this world justifies in such a case; and if
the result after all _was_ unfortunate, it would be far easier to
undergo the extremest penalty with so little to reproach myself
for,--than to put aside the adventure,--waive the wondrous probability
of such best fortune, in a fear of the barest possibility of an
adverse event, and so go to my grave, Walter the Penniless, with an
eternal recollection that Miss Burdett Coutts once offered to wager
sundry millions with me that she could throw double-sixes a dozen
times running--which wager I wisely refused to accept because it was
not written in the stars that such a sequence might never be. I had
rather, rather a thousand-fold lose my paltry stake, and be the one
recorded victim to such an unexampled unluckiness that half a dozen
mad comets, suns gone wrong, and lunatic moons must have come
laboriously into conjunction for my special sake to bring it to pass,
which were no