Part 19 (1/2)
You know you inserted a letter from Jersey about fish.[50]
A lady there tells me that formerly you might have a bucket of oysters for sixpence and that now you can scarcely get anything but such coa.r.s.e kinds of fish as are not liked; and she has a sister, a sad invalid, to whom fish would be a very pleasant and wholesome change. This is really a sad state of things, and _here_ the railways seem very likely to carry away our b.u.t.ter, and it is now such a price, quite ex[h]orbitant.
Why did I put an _h_ in? Is it to prove the truth of what you say, that ladies do not spell well? A letter which I once wrote when a girl was a wonderful specimen of bad spelling.
[Footnote 49: See ”Queen of the Air,”]
[Footnote 50: See ”Fors Clavigera,” Letter x.x.x.]
_15th May._
I have found such lovely pa.s.sages in Vol. 1 this morning that I am delighted, and have begun to copy one of them. You do float in such beautiful things sometimes that you make me feel I don't know how!
How I thank you for ever having written them, for though late in the day, they were written for _me_, and have at length reached me!
You are so candid about your age that I shall tell you mine! I am astonished to find myself sixty-eight--very near the Psalmist's threescore and ten. Much illness and much sorrow, and then I woke up to find myself _old_, and as if I had lost a great part of my life.
Let us hope it was not all lost.
I think _you_ can understand me when I say that I have a great fund of love, and no one to spend it upon, because there are not any to whom I could give it _fully_, and I love my pets so dearly, but I _dare not_ and cannot enjoy it fully because--they _die_, or get injured, and then my misery is intense. I feel as if I could tell _you_ much, because your sympathy is so refined and so tender and true. Cannot I be a sort of second mother to you? I am sure the first one was often praying for blessings for you, and in this, at least, I resemble her.
Am I tiresome writing all this? It just came, and you said I was to write what did. We have had some nice rain, but followed not by warmth, but a cruel _east_ wind.
ABOUT WRENS.
This year I have seen wrens' nests in three different kinds of places--one built in the angle of a doorway, one under a bank, and a third near the top of a raspberry bush; this last was so large that when our gardener first saw it, he thought it was a swarm of bees. It seems a pleasure to this active bird to build; he will begin to build several nests sometimes before he completes one for Jenny Wren to lay her eggs and make her nursery. Think how busy both he and Jenny are when the sixteen young ones come out of their sh.e.l.ls--little helpless gaping things wanting feeding in their turns the livelong summer day!
What hundreds and thousands of small insects they devour! they catch flies with good-sized wings. I have seen a parent wren with its beak so full that the wings stood out at each side like the whiskers of a cat.