Let me thank you, very sincerely, for your kind note and for the little
book. I read the latter on my way down here with the greatest pleasure.
It is a charming story gracefully told, and very gracefully and worthily
translated. I have not been better pleased with a book for a long time.
I cannot say I take very kindly to the illustrations. They are a long
way behind the tale to my thinking. The artist understands it very well,
I dare say, but does not express his understanding of it, in the least
degree, to any sense of mine.
Ah Rosherville! That fated Rosherville, when shall we see it! Perhaps in
one of those intervals when I am up to town from here, and suddenly
appear at Gore House, somebody will propose an excursion there, next
day. If anybody does, somebody else will be ready to go. So this
deponent maketh oath and saith.
I am looking out upon a dark gray sea, with a keen north-east wind
blowing it in shore. It is more like late autumn than midsummer, and
there is a howling in the air as if the latter were in a very hopeless
state indeed. The very Banshee of Midsummer is rattling the windows
drearily while I write. There are no visitors in the place but children,
and they (my own included) have all got the hooping-cough, and go about
the beach choking incessantly. A miserable wanderer lectured in a
library last night about astronomy; but being in utter solitude he
snuffed out the transparent planets he had brought with him in a box and
fled in disgust. A white mouse and a little tinkling box of music that
stops at "come," in the melody of the Buffalo Gals, and can't play "out
to-night," are the only amusements left.
I beg from my solitude to send my love to Lady Blessington, and your
sister, and Count D'Orsay. I think of taming spiders, as Baron Trenck
did. There is one in my cell (with a speckled body and twenty-two very
decided knees) who seems to know me.
Dear Miss Power,
Faithfully yours ever.
[Sidenote: Mr. H. P. Smith.]