14th May.
My dearest Friend,—Your letter yesterday did me so much good, and though I answered it at once, yet here I am again. A kind woman from the other side has sent me the loveliest group of drooping and very tender ferns, soft as of some velvet belonging to the fairies, and of the most exquisite green, and primroses, and a slender stalked white flower, and so arranged, that they continually remind me of that enchanting group of yours in Vol. 3, which you said I might cut out. What would you have thought of me if I had? Oh, that you would and could sketch this group—or even that your eye could rest upon it! Now you will laugh if I ask you whether harpies [49] ever increase in number? or whether they are only the "old original." They quite torment me when I open the window, and blow chaff at me. I suppose at this moment, dearest Joanie is steaming away to Liverpool; one always wants to know now whether people accomplish a journey safely. When the blackbirds come for soaked bread, they generally eat a nice little lot [Pg 99] themselves, before carrying any away from the window for their little ones; but Bobbie, "our little English Robin," has just been twice, took none for himself, but carries beak-load after beak-load for his speckled infants. How curious the universal love of bread is; so many things like and eat it—even flies and snails!
You know you inserted a letter from Jersey about fish. [50] A lady there tells me that formerly you might have a bucket of oysters for sixpence and that now you can scarcely get anything but such coarse kinds of fish as are not liked; and she has a sister, a sad invalid, to whom fish would be a very pleasant and wholesome change. This is really a sad state of things, and here the railways seem very likely to carry away our butter, and it is now such a price, quite ex[h]orbitant. Why did I put an h in? Is it to prove the truth of what you say, that ladies do not spell well? A letter which I once wrote when a girl was a wonderful specimen of bad spelling.
15th May.
I have found such lovely passages in Vol. 1 this morning that I am delighted, and have begun to copy one of them. You do float in such beautiful things sometimes that you make me feel I don't know how!
How I thank you for ever having written them, for though late in the day, they were written for me, and have at length reached me!