“I rode to one of the out-stations with Hubert yesterday, and we got such glorious ferns coming back. I am sorry to say dear mother is not over strong. The hot weather, and the old trouble, ‘no servants,’ have been too much for her. Do you think you could bring back a good, willing girl as cook and laundress—that would shift the hardest part of the work off our shoulders—and I think Linda and I could manage the house-work, and be thankful too? Try your best, that’s a good old dad!
“I have been reading Middlemarch strictly in spare time, and am getting on pretty well with my German and Italian. If you could bring up two or three books, and by all means a pretty song or two, we should have nothing left to wish for. Now that the rain has come, it seems like a new world. I intend to do great things in languages next year. How about Mrs. Carlyle’s letters? From the review we saw in The Australasian, they must be deeply interesting. We expect you to return quite restored to your old self. Write longer letters, and I am always,
“Your loving daughter,
“Laura Stamford.”
“So far, so good, indeed,” quoth Mr. Stamford to himself. “The year has turned with a vengeance. Let me see what the Herald’s telegrams say. Lucky I did not look at the paper. So Hubert’s letter gives me first news. Ah! another letter. Handwriting unknown, formal, with the English postmark, too. No bad news, I hope. Though I can hardly imagine any news of importance from the old country, good or bad, now. Luckily, I am outside the pale of bad news for a while, thanks to Barrington Hope and this breaking up of the drought. What says the Herald?
”Mooramah.
“(From our Own Correspondent.)
“Drought broken up. Heavy, continuous rain. Six inches in forty-eight hours. Country under water. Dams full. A grand season anticipated.
“Quite right for once, ‘Our Own Correspondent,’ albeit too prone to pronounce the ‘drought broken up’ on insufficient data. But now accurately and carefully observant. I drink to him in a fresh cup of tea.
“And now for the unknown correspondent. Here we have him.”