for playhouses, and
cannot keep out of them, and I would as lief spend my evening in hearing
pretty music as alone here....

I drove up and down Regent Street three times in vain to find your
identical cutler, Mr. Kingsbury: perhaps he has left off business, and
some one else has taken his shop. _So_ what shall I do with your
scissors? Do you think if I talk to them they will be sharpened?...

I have not heard again from Bath, and have seen nobody but Fanny Wilson,
with whom I dine to-morrow, and Mrs. Mitchell's two boys....

I shall get through my packing very well. Hayes is greatly improved, and
really _begins_ now to be useful to me. Thus we most of us begin only
just as we come to the _end_ and leave off.

I was driving about all yesterday, doing commissions; to-day the sun
shines, and I am going to wade in the mud for my health.

God bless you. Kiss dear Dorothy for me.

Ever yours,
FANNY.

NORWICH, Wednesday, January 20th.

I have found your cutler, Kingsbury; and very glad I was to find him,
for I hate not being able to execute a commission exactly as I am
desired to do....

When I said that people never love others better than themselves, I did
not mean _more_, but in a better way than they love themselves. I mean
that those who are conscientious in their self-regard will be
conscientious in their regard for others, and that it takes good people
to make good friends; and I do not consider this a "paradox of mine," as
you uncivilly style it. It is a _conviction_ of mine, and I feel sure
that you agree with it, whatever your first impression of my meaning may
have been when I said that people never loved others better than
themselves (_i.e._, with a better kind of love). I know that very
unprincipled people are capable of affection, and their affection
partakes of their want of principle: people have committed crimes for
the sake of the love they bore their wives, mistresses (oftener), and
children; and half the meannesses, pettinesses, and selfishnesses of
which society is full, have their source in unprincipled affection as
much as in unprincipled self-love.

I had already taken to my King Street lodging when I left it for this
place. You know I have a horror of new places and a facility in getting
over it, which is a double disadvantage in this wandering life of mine