ts and images that the eye encounters are all
cheerful, pleasing, peaceful, and satisfactorily suggestive of the
blessings of industry and the secure repose of modest, moderate
prosperity.

Dearest Granny, I had not intended to cross my letter to you; but the
young ones will decipher the scrawl for you, and I flatter myself that
you will not object to my filling my paper as full as it will hold.
These four small pages, even when they are crossed, make but a poor
amount of communication compared with the full and frequent personal
intercourse I have enjoyed with you.

What a shocking mess you are all making of it in Ireland just now! I
hear too that you are threatened with bad crops. Should this be true, I
do not wonder at my lord's croaking, for what will the people do?

The water we bathe in here is strongly impregnated with iron, and so
cold that very few people go into the spring itself. I do: and when the
thermometer is at 98 deg. in the shade, a plunge into water below 50 deg. is
something of a shock. B---- would like it, and so do I. Will you give my
affectionate remembrance to my lord, and

Believe me always, dear Granny,
Your attached
F. A. B.

YELLOW SPRINGS, 19th July, 1843.

And so, my dear T----, you are a "tied-by-the-leg" (as we used, in our
laughing days, to call the penniless young Attaches to Legations)? I am
heartily sorry, as yours is not diplomatic but physical infirmity; and
would very readily, had I been anywhere within possible reach, have
occupied the empty arm-chair in your library, and "charmed your annoys"
to the best of my ability.... Dear me! through how long a lapse of
years your desire that I would undertake a translation of Schiller's
"Fiesco" leads me! When I was between sixteen and seventeen years old, I
actually began an adaptation of it to the English stage; but partly from
thinking the catastrophe unmanageable, and from various other motives, I
never finished it: but it was an early literary dream of mine, and you
have recalled to me a very happy period of my life in reminding me of
that labor of love. You perhaps imagine from this that I understood
German, which I then did not; my acquaintance with the German drama
existing only through very admirably executed literal French
translations, which formed part of an immense colle