Tell Sophy that Peggy Tuite, who turned into Peggy Mulheeran, has had a dead child. When my mother said to her brother, "Do not let people crowd in and heat her room," "Oh, ma'am, sure I am standing at the door since three in the morning, sentinel, to keep them out," the tears dropping from his eyes fast on the ground as he spoke. And all the time the old ould mother Tuite (who doats on Mrs. Ruxton-dear) was sitting rocking herself to and fro, and "crying under the big laurel, that Peggy might not hear her."
You may all praise erysipelas as much as you please, but I never desire to see or feel it again. Our boy, Mick Duffy, has been ill with it these ten days. Honora said to his father, Brian, "How can you be so fond of Michael; now that he lives with us, you hardly ever see him!" "Oh, how could I but be fond of him, the crater that sends me every guinea he gets!"
July 8.
So Buonaparte is dead! and no change will be made in any country by the death of a man who once made such a figure in the world! He who commanded empires and sovereigns, a prisoner in an obscure island, disputing for a bottle of wine, subject to the petty tyranny of Sir Hudson Lowe! I regret that England permitted that trampling upon the fallen. What an excellent dialogue of the dead might be written between Buonaparte and Themistocles!
Ages ago I sent Bracebridge Hall to Merrion Street for you: have you got it? Next week another book will be there for you—an American novel Mrs. Griffith sent to me, The Spy; quite new scenes and characters, humour and pathos, a picture of America in Washington's time; a surgeon worthy of Smollett or Moore, and quite different from any of their various surgeons; and an Irishwoman, Betty Flanagan, incomparable.
August 3.
What do you think is my employment out of doors, and what it has been this week past? My garden? no such elegant thing; but making a gutter! a sewer and a pathway in the street of Edgeworthstown; and I do declare I am as much interested about it as I ever was in writing anything in my life. We have never here yet found it necessary to have recourse to public contribution for the poor, but it is necessary to give some assistance to the labouring class; and I find that making the said gutter and pathway will employ twenty men for three weeks.
Did you ever hear these two excellent Tory lines made by a celebrated Whig?
As bees alighting upon flowerets cease to hum,
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb.
August 8.