Gad's Hill, Tuesday, July 20th, 1869.
My dearest Macready,
I have received your letter here to-day, and deeply feel with you and for you the affliction of poor dear Katie's loss. I was not unprepared for the sad news, but it comes in such a rush of old remembrances and withered joys that strikes to the heart.
God bless you! Love and youth are still beside you, and in that thought I take comfort for my dear old friend.
I am happy to report myself perfectly well and flourishing. We are just now announcing the resumption and conclusion of the broken series of farewell readings in a London course of twelve, beginning early in the new year.
Scarcely a day has gone by this summer in which we have not talked of you and yours. Georgina, Mary, and I continually speak of you. In the spirit we certainly are even more together than we used to be in the body in the old times. I don't know whether you have heard that Harry has taken the second scholarship (fifty pounds a year) at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The bigwigs expect him to do a good deal there.
Wills having given up in consequence of broken health (he has been my sub-editor for twenty years), I have taken Charley into "All the Year Round." He is a very good man of business, and evinces considerable aptitude in sub-editing work.
This place is immensely improved since you were here, and really is now very pretty indeed. We are sorry that there is no present prospect of your coming to see it; but I like to know of your being at the sea, and having to do—from the beach, as Mrs. Keeley used to say in "The Prisoner of War"—with the winds and the waves and all their freshening influences.
I dined at Greenwich a few days ago with Delane. He asked me about you with much interest. He looks as if he had never seen a printing-office, and had never been out of bed after midnight.
Great excitement caused here by your capital news of Butty. I suppose Willy has at least a dozen children by this time.