are not bound to repay it in length, even if you
answer it at all; which I again vainly ask you not to do if a bore.

I hear from Mrs. Mowbray that our dear Donne is but 'pretty well'; and I
am still yours

E. F.G.

LV.

WOODBRIDGE: _April_ 25, [1879.]

DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,

I think I have let sufficient time elapse before asking you for another
Letter. I want to know how you are: and, if you can tell me that you are
as well as you and I now expect to be--anyhow, well rid of that Whooping
Cough--that will be news enough for one Letter. What else, you shall add
of your own free will:--not feeling bound.

When you last wrote me from Leamington, you crossed over your Address:
and I (thinking perhaps of America) deciphered it 'Baltimore.' I wonder
the P. O. did not return me my Letter: but there was no Treason in it, I
dare say.

My Brother keeps waiting--and hoping--for--Death: which will not come:
perhaps Providence would have let it come sooner, were he not rich enough
to keep a Doctor in the house, to keep him in Misery. I don't know if I
told you in my last that he was ill; seized on by a Disease not uncommon
to old Men--an 'internal Disorder' it is polite to say; but I shall say
to you, disease of the Bladder. I had always supposed he would be found
dead one good morning, as my Mother was--as I hoped to be--quietly dead
of the Heart which he had felt for several Years. But no; it is seen
good that he shall be laid on the Rack--which he may feel the more keenly
as he never suffered Pain before, and is not of a strong Nerve. I will
say no more of this. The funeral Bell, which has been at work, as I
never remember before, all this winter, is even now, as I write, tolling
from St. Mary's Steeple.

'Parlons d'autres choses,' as my dear Sevigne says.

I--We--have finished all Sir Walter's Scotch Novels; and I thought I
would try an English one: Kenilworth--a wonderful Drama, which Theatre,
Opera, and Ballet (as I once saw it represented) may well reproduce. The
Scene at Greenwich, where Elizabeth 'interviews' Sussex and Leicester,
seemed to me as fine as what is called (I am told, wrongly) Shakespeare's
Henry VIII. {145} Of course, plenty of melodrama in most other
parts:--but the Plot wonderful.

Then--after Sir Walter--Dickens' Copperfield, which came to an end last
night because I would not let my Reader read the last Chapter. What a
touch when Peggotty--the man--at last finds the lost Girl,