Walter goes back to school on the 1st of August. Will you come out of
school to this breezy vacation on the same day, or rather _this day
fortnight, July 31st_? for that is the day on which he leaves us, and we
begin (here's a parent!) to be able to be comfortable. Why a boy of that
age should seem to have on at all times a hundred and fifty pair of
double-soled boots, and to be always jumping a bottom stair with the
whole hundred and fifty, I don't know. But the woeful fact is within my
daily experience.
We have a very pleasant little house, overlooking the sea, and I think
you will like the place. It rained, in honour of our arrival, with the
greatest vigour, yesterday. I went out after dinner to buy some nails
(you know the arrangements that would be then in progress), and I
stopped in the rain, about halfway down a steep, crooked street, like a
crippled ladder, to look at a little coachmaker's, where there had just
been a sale. Speculating on the insolvent coachmaker's business, and
what kind of coaches he could possibly have expected to get orders for
in Folkestone, I thought, "What would bring together fifty people now,
in this little street, at this little rainy minute?" On the instant, a
brewer's van, with two mad horses in it, and the harness dangling about
them--like the trappings of those horses you are acquainted with, who
bolted through the starry courts of heaven--dashed by me, and in that
instant, such a crowd as would have accumulated in Fleet Street sprang
up magically. Men fell out of windows, dived out of doors, plunged down
courts, precipitated themselves down steps, came down waterspouts,
instead of rain, I think, and I never saw so wonderful an instance of
the gregarious effect of an excitement.
A man, a woman, and a child had been thrown out on the horses taking
fright and the reins breaking. The child is dead, and the woman very ill
but will probably recover, and the man has a hand broken and other
mischief done to him.
Let me know what Wigan says. If he does not take the play, and readily
too, I would recommend you not to offer it elsewhere. You have gained
great reputation by it, have done your position a deal of good, and (as
I think) stand so well with it, that it is a pity to engender the notion
that you care to stand better.
Ever faithfully.
[Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.]