I caught one cold on Wednesday last, another on Thursday, two on Friday, four on Saturday, and one at every station between this and Ingleborough on Monday. I never was in such ignoble misery of cold. I've no cough to speak of, nor anything worse than usual in the way of [Pg 84] sneezing, but my hands are cold, my pulse nowhere, my nose tickles and wrings me, my ears sing—like kettles, my mouth has no taste, my heart no hope of ever being good for anything, any more. I never passed such a wretched morning by my own fireside in all my days, and I've quite a fiendish pleasure in telling you all this, and thinking how miserable you'll be too. Oh me, if I ever get to feel like myself again, won't I take care of myself.
The feathers nearly made me fly away from all my Psalters and Exoduses, to you, and my dear Peacocks. I wonder when Solomon got his ivory and apes and peacocks, whether he ever had time to look at them. He couldn't always be ordering children to be chopped in two. Alas, I suppose his wisdom, in England of to-day, would have been taxed to find out which mother lied in saying which child wasn't hers!
I've been writing to Miss R. again, and Miss L.'s quite right to stay at home. "She thinks I have an eagle's eye." Well, what else should I have, in day time? together with my cat's eye in the dark? But you may tell her I should be very sorry if my eyes were no better than eagles'! "Doth the eagle know what is in the pit?" [46] I do.
I hope you will be comforted in any feeling of languor or depression in yourself by hearing that I also am wholly lack lustrous, depressed, oppressed, compressed, and downpressed by a quite countless pressgang of despondencies, humilities, remorses, shamefacednesses, all overnesses, all undernesses, sicknesses, dullnesses, darknesses, sulkinesses, and everything that rhymes to lessness and distress, and that I'm sure you and I are at present the mere targets of the darts of the——, etc., etc., and Mattie's [Pg 85] waiting and mustn't be loaded with more sorrow; but I can't tell you how sorry I am to break my promise to-day, but it would not be safe for me to come.
I'm a little better, but can't laugh much yet, and won't cry if I can help it. Yet it always makes me nearly cry, to hear of those poor working men trying to express themselves and nobody ever teaching them, nor anybody in all England, knowing that painting is an art, and sculpture also, and that an untaught man can no more carve or paint, than play the fiddle. All efforts of the kind, mean simply that we have neither master nor scholars in any rank or any place. And I, also, what have I done for Coniston schools yet! I don't deserve an oyster shell, far less an oyster.
Kirby Lonsdale