f jaundice and is in a miserable
state. He was asleep when I got here, and the good old landlady,
thinking the front sitting-room would be free, had invited 'company,'
i.e., two or three married daughters and their belongings; one of the
children beats Magnay's 'Carina' as to beauty--he ought to paint her.
Happy thought, send him and pretty Mrs. Esperance down here on spec. He
can paint the child for the next Academy, and meantime I could enjoy his
company. Well, all these good folks being just set-to at roast beef, I
naturally wouldn't hear of disturbing them, and in the end was obliged
to sit down too and eat at that hour of the day the hugest dinner
you ever saw--anything but voracious appetites offended the hostess.
Magnay's future model, for all its angelic face, 'ate to repletion,'
like the fair American in the story. Then I went into my father's
room, and shortly after he woke up and asked me to give him some
Friedrichshall water, making no comment at all on my return, but just
behaving as though I had been here all the autumn, so that I felt as if
the whole affair were a dream. Except for this attack of jaundice, he
has been much as usual, and when you next come down you will find
us settled into our old groove. The quiet of it after London is
extraordinary. But I believe it suits the book, which gets on pretty
fast. This afternoon I went up Lansdowne and right on past the
Grand Stand to Prospect Stile, which is at the edge of a high bit
of tableland, and looks over a splendid stretch of country, with the
Bristol Channel and the Welsh hills in the distance. While I was there
the sun most considerately set in gorgeous array. You never saw anything
like it. It was worth the journey from London to Bath, I can assure
you. Tell Magnay, and may it lure him down; also name the model
aforementioned.

"How is the old Q.C. and his pretty grandchild? That quaint old room of
theirs in the Temple somehow took my fancy, and the child was divine. Do
you remember my showing you, in a gloomy narrow street here, a jolly old
watchmaker who sits in his shop-window and is for ever bending over sick
clocks and watches? Well, he's still sitting there, as if he had never
moved since we saw him that Saturday months ago. I mean to study him for
a portrait; his sallow, clean-shaved, wrinkled face has a whole story
in it. I believe he is married to a Xantippe who throws cold water over
him, both literally and metaphorically; but he is a ph