.
I hope you did not get a chill in the garden. The weather is a little wrong again, but I am thankful for last night's sunset.
You know our English Bible is only of James 1st time—Stalk is a Saxon word, and gets into English I fancy as early as the Plantagenets—but I have not hunted it down.—I'm just in the same mess with "pith," but I'm finding out a great deal about the thing though not the word, for next "Deucalion," in chopping my wood.
You know, "Funckia" won't last long. I am certain I shall have strength enough to carry my system of nomenclature at least as far, as to exclude people's individual names.
I won't even have a "Susia"—stay—that's Christian—yes, I will have a Susia. But not a "Beeveria," though——
TO MISS BEEVER.
20th January, 1879.
You will not doubt the extreme sorrow with which I have heard of all that was ordered to be, of terrible, in your peaceful and happy household. Without for an instant supposing, but, on the contrary, utterly refusing to admit, that such calamities [27] may be used to point a moral (all useful morality having every point that God meant it to have, perfectly sharp and bright without any burnishing of [Pg 40] ours), still less to adorn a tale (the tales of modern days depending far too much upon Scythian decoration with Death's heads), I, yet, if I had been Mr. Chapman, would have pointed out that all concealments, even of trivial matters, on the part of young servants from kind mistresses, are dangerous no less than unkind and ungenerous, and that a great deal of preaching respecting the evil nature of man and the anger of God might be spared, if children and servants were only taught, as a religious principle, to tell their mothers and mistresses, when they go out, exactly where they are going and what they are going to do. I think both you and Miss Susan ought to use every possible means of changing, or at least checking, the current of such thoughts in your minds; and I am in hopes that you may have a little pleasure in examining the plates in the volume of Sibthorpe's "F. Græca" which I send to-day, in comparison with those of "F. Danica." The vulgarity and lifelessness of Sibthorpe's plates are the more striking because in mere execution they are the more elaborate of the two; the chief point in the "F. Danica" being the lovely artistic skill. The drawings for Sibthorpe, by a young German, were as exquisite as the Dane's, but the English engraver and colorist spoiled all.