h is to be very _fortunate_--which word I use
advisedly, for, though the nobler of the two, wisdom is allowed to all,
knowledge is not.

I agree with you in what you say of Harriet Martineau's book: the good
in it is _her_ peculiar good (very good good it is, too), but it must be
taken with the shadow of her bad upon it. It seems to me occasionally a
little hard and dogmatical, and I have not liked it, upon the whole, as
much as I expected, for it is rather less Christian than I expected; yet
it is a very valuable book, and I was very thankful for it.

I shall send the recipe for making effervescing bread forthwith to
Lenox, to Catherine Sedgwick, who is a martyr to dyspepsia and bad
baking, and who, being herself an expert cook, will know how to have the
staff of life prepared from these directions, so as to support instead
of piercing her, as it mostly does, up among those country operators.
They never have good bread there, and are all miserable in consequence,
especially herself and her brother Charles, who have delicate stomachs
and cannot endure the heavy sour concoction which they are nevertheless
obliged to swallow by way of daily bread. (I almost wonder how they
manage to say the Lord's Prayer petition for it.)

The note you forwarded me from Liverpool was another scream from that
mad manageress about Macbeth. I wonder if her whole life is passed in
such agonies; I think it must be worse than the greatest bodily pain.

Only think, my dear, on arriving here, and inquiring for Hayes, I
recollected that I had sent her to Bath and not to Bristol! "Consekens
is," as Mr. Sam Weller says (but alas for you! you don't know Pickwick),
that I have had to send off a porter from this house to Bath, per
railway, to reclaim my erring maid, and fetch her hither; and, being
Sunday, fewer trains go between the two places than usual, and she
cannot get here till near four o'clock this afternoon, until which time
I dare not trust myself to think of the state of mind of the abandoned
(in the perfectly honest sense of the word) Bridget or Biddy Hayes;
indeed, I shall not get her here till six this evening, and I only hope
that I may then.

What a moon there was last night! and how it made me think of you, as it
shone into the dark lofty room at Birmingham, where I sat playing and
singing very sadly all by myself! The sea must have been as smooth as
glass, and you cannot have been sick, even with your best endeavor.

The road f