Part 9 (1/2)

What lovely pictures you would have made in the old b.u.t.terfly times, of opal and felspar! What lost creatures we all are, we nice ones! The Alps and clouds that _I_ could have done, if I had been shown how.

_27th June_ (1879).

Everybody's gone! and I have all the new potatoes, and all the asparagus, and all the oranges and everything, and my Susie too, all to myself.

I wrote in my diary this morning that really on the whole I never felt better in my life. Mouth, eyes, head, feet, and fingers all fairly in trim; older than they were, yes, but if the head and heart grow wiser, they won't want feet or fingers some day.

And I'll come to be cheered and scolded myself the moment I've got things a little to rights here. I think imps get into the shelves and drawers, if they're kept long locked, and must be caught like mice.

The boys have been very good, and left everything untouched; but the imps; and to hear people say there aren't any! How happy you and I should always be if it weren't for them!

How gay you were and how you cheered me up after the dark lake.

Please say ”John Inglesant” is harder than real history and of no mortal use. I couldn't read four pages of it. Clever, of course.

HERNE HILL, _14th August, 1880_.

I've _just_ finished my Scott paper:[28] but it has retouchings and notings yet to do. I couldn't write a word before; haven't so much as a syllable to Diddie, and only a move at chess to Macdonald, for, you know, to keep a chess player waiting for a move is like keeping St.

Lawrence unturned.

[Footnote 28: ”Fiction Fair and Foul”, No. 3.]

_21st August, 1880._

I'm leaving to-day for Dover, and a line from you to-morrow or Monday would find me certainly at Poste Restante, Abbeville.

I have not been working at all, but enjoying myself (only that takes up time all the same) at Crystal Palace concerts, and jugglings, and at Zoological Gardens, where I had a snake seven feet long to play with, only I hadn't much time to make friends, and it rather wanted to get away all the time. And I gave the hippopotamus _whole_ buns, and he was delighted, and saw the cormorant catch fish thrown to him six yards off; never missed one; you would have thought the fish ran along a wire up to him and down his throat. And I saw the penguin swim under water, and the sea lions sit up, four of them on four wooden chairs, and catch fish also; but they missed sometimes and had to flop off their chairs into the water and then flop out again and flop up again.

And I lunched with Cardinal Manning, and he gave me _such_ a plum pie. I never tasted a Protestant pie to touch it.

Now you're just wrong about my darling Cardinal. See what it is to be jealous! He gave me lovely soup, roast beef, hare and currant jelly, puff pastry like Papal pretensions--you had but to breathe on it and it was nowhere--raisins and almonds, and those lovely preserved cherries like kisses kept in amber. And told me delicious stories all through lunch. _There_!

And we really do see the sun here! And last night the sky was all a spangle and delicate glitter of stars, the glare of them and spikiness softened off by a young darling of a moon.

AMIENS, _29th August, 1880_.

You have been made happy doubtless with us by the news from Herne Hill. I've only a telegram yet though, but write at once to congratulate you on your little G.o.ddaughter.