Don’t let there be a shade of melancholy in your letters; it disquiets me vastly. Why should you be melancholy? God is very good to us, and we must not pine if we are not always all together as if in heaven. Therefore write very comically about friends and home....
Eternal blessings crown my darling Lou, and guardian angels hover over her.
Charles.
* * * * *
Coria, July 8, 1809.
It is quite a relief, dearest Lou, to be transferred from the filthy styes of the Portuguese to the clean houses of the Spaniards. And as I am shaking off the dust contracted in Portugal, so I am scraping my tongue of those odious inarticulate sounds which compose their language, and gargling vinegar that my throat may be capable of touching with the true Castilian burr the energetic language of Spain.
Alas! I have lost one of my first comforts, a new blue, patent, silver-mounted, morocco writing-case; all my letter-paper, pens, ink, letters, secrets, verses, etc., etc.; also dear Lady N——’s series of useless boxes—all lost by the rascal Pedro, Bernardo’s opposite in everything. The devil take it, though I have lost it a week ago, I cannot recover my temper.
Hitherto I pass my time very pleasantly. I have got a fine young engineer to take care of, whom I row, all the time that he does not sleep, about his vanity; not but that I acknowledge myself to be as vain as he, but that I defy him to have found it out, unless I had told him of it. He is coming into very fine order.
Poor Harry Campbell has been some time unwell, but I hope he is now throwing it off.
General Sherbrooke, to whose division I belong, makes it very pleasant to me. I dine with him mostly, and like him vastly. I think of him very highly as a general. He thinks of Sir John Moore just as I do.