Do right, dear B., and send us the noose; for really the old Engines who are here for their health look so billyus, that without something to enliven us, we should get worse instead of better.
Ajew, ever yours,
D. L. Ramsbottom.
XVIII.
HASTINGS AGAIN.
To John Bull.
Hastings, July 8, 1828.
Dear B.,—Here we are, after a short tower to Dip in France, in the esteem packet the Tarbut—my fourth has been mylad, as the French say, and was recommended a little voyage, and she picked up an old bow, which talked to her in French, and called her a belley spree, which I thought was impotence, but Lavinia said no, and reminded me of judy spree, which is another gallowsism, as they style them—but why they call this place green and young Hastings, which is old and brown, I don't know—they are going, however, to move it about a mile nearer Bexhill, to the stone where William the Third landed when he had conquered the Normans—our old bow said it was a capital sight for a town; but as yet I couldn't see much, although everybody is taking the houses before they are built.
We was a-staying with a couzen of mine near Lewis, before we crossed the sea—he is married, and has a firm hornee, which his wife calls a Russen hurby, it is so close to the town, and yet so uncommon rural—the sheep he has, is called marinos, because it is near the sea; and their wool is so fine that they fold them up every night, which I had no notion of—they have two sorts of them, one, which they call the fine weather mutton, stays out all night, I believe, and the other doesn't. But the march of intellect is agoing on, for the dirty boys about the farm-yard, they told me, are sent to Harrow, and the sheep themselves have their pens found them every night; what to do I don't know, and I never like to ask—at Battle, where there is an old abbé living—we did not see him—they have built a large chapel for the Unicorns; I scarcely know what sex they are—I know the Whistling Methodists, because when Mr. Ram and I was young we used to go to the meetin, and hear them preach like anything—there's a great deal of religion in Sussex of one sort and another.
My eldest, Mrs. Fulmer, has come here for her a-coach-man—Fulmer wishes it may be a mail, because what they have already is all gurls; if it hadn't been for that, I should have gone to Mrs. Grimsditch's soreye at Hackney last week, when I was to have been done out as Alderman Wenables, but I was obliged to be stationary here. I was so sorry to see in the noosepapers that when the Lord High Admiral exhibited his feet on the 18th of June, Maria Wood was dressed up so strange; they said that after she had been painted, and some part of her scraped clean from duck weed, they tied flags to her stays, and put a Jack into her head, which I think quite wrong, because them Jacks is uncommon insinuating.