Some one from this house is going to London: and I will try and write you
some lines now in half an hour before dinner: I am going out for the
evening to my old lady who teaches me the names of the stars, and other
chaste information. {59} You see, Master John Allen, that if I do not
come to London (and I have no thought of going yet) and you will not
write, there is likely to be an end of our communication: not by the way
that I am never to go to London again: but not just yet. Here I live
with tolerable content: perhaps with as much as most people arrive at,
and what if one were properly grateful one would perhaps call perfect
happiness. Here is a glorious sunshiny day: all the morning I read about
Nero in Tacitus lying at full length on a bench in the garden: a
nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun manfully not
far off. A funny mixture all this: Nero, and the delicacy of Spring: all
very human however. Then at half past one lunch on Cambridge cream
cheese: then a ride over hill and dale: then spudding up some weeds from
the grass: and then coming in, I sit down to write to you, my sister
winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the most delightful
little girl in the world chattering incessantly. So runs the world away.
You think I live in Epicurean ease: but this happens to be a jolly day:
one isn't always well, or tolerably good, the weather is not always
clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity.
But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it. . . .
Give my love to Thackeray from your upper window across the street. {60a}
So he has lost a little child: and moreover has been sorry to do so.
Well, good-bye my dear John Allen: Auld Lang Syne. My kind regards to
your Lady.
Down to the vale this water steers,
How merrily it goes:
'T will murmur on a thousand years,
And flow as now it flows. {60b}