“Sydney is away to Rome honeymooning it very pleasantly, and meeting all manner of attentions, &c. The trousseau has spoilt my trip to town. I have ‘taken out’ in white lace what I meant for ‘whitebait,’ and I must try and screw on in life for one year more if I mean to see London again. It was the celebrated Betty O’Dwyer that said to her legs, ‘I’ll take another season out of you before I’ll give you to Tom O’Callaghan.’”
To Mr William Blackwood.
“March 16,1870.
“I have no patience with you for being ill. What I a fellow of something and twenty, with a sound chest, six feet in his stockings, and a hunter in top condition; what an ungrateful dog to Fortune you are! Leave sickness to old cripples like myself,—hipped, dunned, and blue-devilled,—with a bad balance at the bank, and a ruined digestion. You have no business with malady! Come over and see me here: the very contrast will make you happy and contented.
“I hope, however, you are all right by this time. I’m sure you stick too close to the desk. Be warned by me! It was all over-application and excessive industry ruined my constitution; and instead of being threatened to be cut off, as I am now, in the flower of my youth, I might have lived on to a ripe old age, and all that rottenness that they tell us makes ‘medlars’ exquisite.
“I send you a tailpiece to the O’D. Heaven grant that the Saxon intelligence, for which I daily feel less veneration, should not suspect me of being a Fenian in disguise, though if it should get me dismissed from my consulate and turned out into the streets, I’d almost cry hurrah! for, after all, picking oakum could scarcely be worse than cudgelling my brains for what, after all the manipulation, can’t be got out of them.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, April 1,1870.
“I suppose ‘Sanding the Sugar’ reached you too late, or was it that you don’t like it? I thought it was good, but needed careful going over again and perhaps enlarging.
“I send you three now, and hope you will like them. I have been days over them, and without getting on, for my poor wife’s time of being operated on again draws nigh, and her fear and nervousness have made her seriously ill. For the last three nights I have been sitting up beside her, and as I have been very ‘creaky’ some time back, this pressure has pushed me very hard indeed.