After your preliminary wanderings, my dear Stephen O’Dysseus, welcome home again! You were always the worst courier in the world; I’ve not ever known you to bring one of your young and very lovely charges to her destination without encountering cataclysmal adventures on the road.... Still, would that I had known that you can buy collars, clean and therefore presumably new collars, at Drogheda for fourpence apiece. Yesterday I paid fifteen shillings for a dozen....
On 21.12.19 he writes to offer me good wishes for Christmas:
The one and only thing that the Fortunate Youth appeared to me not to possess will reach you in a little registered packet to-morrow evening.... You are to accept it as a token of the happiness which I wish you during this Christmas and the whole of the coming year.
That was a very jolly party on Wednesday: I enjoyed everything: the gay and kindly company, the admirable foodstuffs, even the music; and, if it be true, as I told you, that Covent Garden has shrunk in size since my young days, I am compelled to confess that your box was a larger than I ever saw before.
At this season of excess, he writes on Christmas Day, I am allowed to indulge my passion for chocolates, but not to buy any for myself; and it was most thoughtful of you to pander to my taste. Thank you ever so much. And thank you also for your good wishes....
I must be off to mass, but not without first begging you to hand your mother and sister my best wishes for a happy New Year. As to you, I shall see or talk to you before then.... My young Sinn Feiner has written a novel[10] which to my mind is a most remarkable production and which will have to be read by you at all costs. It is published in Dublin; and it is doubtful whether a single other copy will find its way to this foreign land.
In April Teixeira and his wife went to Hove: and on 27.4.20 he writes:
It is blowing what-you-may-call-it here: ’arf a mo’, ’arf a brick, half a gale. Apart from that, we are well and send our love.