This is from his cousin's house in Suffolk. Some of the impressions
then received of the contrasts between Scotland and England were
later worked out in the essay _The Foreigner at Home_, printed at the
head of _Memories and Portraits_:--
_Cockfield Rectory, Sudbury, Suffolk, Tuesday, July 28, 1873._
MY DEAR MOTHER,--I am too happy to be much of a correspondent. Yesterday
we were away to Melford and Lavenham, both exceptionally placid,
beautiful old English towns. Melford scattered all round a big green,
with an Elizabethan Hall and Park, great screens of trees that seem
twice as high as trees should seem, and everything else like what ought
to be in a novel, and what one never expects to see in reality, made me
cry out how good we were to live in Scotland, for the many hundredth
time. I cannot get over my astonishment--indeed, it increases every
day--at the hopeless gulf that there is between England and Scotland,
and English and Scotch. Nothing is the same; and I feel as strange and
outlandish here as I do in France or Germany. Everything by the
wayside, in the houses, or about the people, strikes me with an
unexpected unfamiliarity: I walk among surprises, for just where you
think you have them, something wrong turns up.
I got a little Law read yesterday, and some German this morning, but on
the whole there are too many amusements going for much work; as for
correspondence, I have neither heart nor time for it to-day.