Your loving
J.H.E.
Caldecott has done seventeen illustrations to "Jackanapes."
To Mrs. A.P. Graves.
June 15, 1883.
My Dear Mrs. Graves,
Once more I thank you for lovely flowers! including one of my chief favourites—a white Iris. It is very good of you. You do not know what pleasure they give me! If you continue to bless me with an occasional nosegay when I move into my house, I shall not so bitterly suffer from the barrenness of the garden.
This is suggestive of the nasty definition of gratitude that it is a keen sense of favours to come!
I have been meaning to write to you to express something of our delight with the "Songs of Old Ireland."
Major Ewing is charmed by the melodies, on which his opinion is worth something and mine is not! and I can't "read them out of a printed book" without an instrument. But—we are equally charmed by the words!!