e sky does not
fall, I shall ride out on my old post-horse at twelve o'clock.

Certainly your question, as to where the wise men are who are to
encounter the difficulties of legislation for this country next spring,
was an exclamation--a shriek--and not an interrogation, addressed to
_me_ at any rate; for though I suppose God's quiver is never empty of
arrows, and that some _are_ always found to do His work, it may be that
saving this country from a gradual decline of greatness and decay of
prosperity may not be work for which He has appointed hands, and which
therefore will not be done....

I declined being in the room we formerly occupied in this house, because
I feared, now the days are so much shorter, that it would be
inconveniently dark. I am in a charming light room, with three windows
down to the ground, and a bewitching paper of pale green, with slender
gold rods running up it, all wound round with various colored
convolvuli. It's one of the prettiest papers I ever saw, and makes me
very happy. You know how subject I am even to such an influence as that
of a ridiculous wall-paper....

I have had no conversation with Mr. Churchill; but, in spite of my
requesting him not to be at the trouble of moving the piano into my
present sitting-room, as I am here for so short a time, I find it
installed here this morning. He certainly is the black swan of
hotel-keepers; and how kind and indulgent people are to me
everywhere!... My young devotee, Miss A----, acquiesced very cordially
in all my physical prescriptions for mental health, and did not seem to
take at all amiss my plunging her hysterical enthusiasm first into
perspirations, and then into cold baths.

Her maid has been with me this morning, with lovely fresh flowers--a
bunch of delicious Persian lilac, and two flower-pots full of various
mosses, smelling so fragrantly of mere earthy freshness that no perfume
ever surpassed it.

The only other greeting she sent me was some pretty lines of Victor
Hugo's, with which I was unacquainted, and which I send you, not for
their singular inappropriateness as applied to me, but for their
graceful turn:

"Tu es comme l'oiseau pose pour un instant
Sur des rameaux trop freles,
Que sent ployer la branche, et qui chante pourtant
Sachant qu'il a des ailes;"

which I translate impromptu thus:

Thou art like the bird that alights, and sings
Though the frail spray bends, for he knows he has wing