I returned yesterday afternoon, Mrs. Grote
being seized in the morning with one of her attacks of neuralgia, for
which she is obliged to take such a quantity of morphine that she is
generally in a state of stupor for four and twenty to thirty hours. The
other guests departed in the morning, and I in the afternoon, after
giving her medicine to her, and seeing her gradually grow stupid under
its effect. Poor woman, she is a wretched sufferer, and I think these
attacks of acute pain in her head answerable for some of the singularity
of her demeanor and conversation, which are sometimes all but
unaccountably eccentric.

You ask me if I saw anything on that bitter cold journey, as I went
along, to interest me. You know I am extremely fond of the act of
travelling: being carried through new country excites one's curiosity
and stimulates one's powers of observation very agreeably, even when
nothing especially beautiful or noteworthy presents itself in the
landscape. I had never seen the east counties of England before, and am
glad to have become acquainted with their aspect, though it is certainly
not what is usually called picturesque. The country between Norwich and
Yarmouth is like the ugliest parts of Holland, swampy and barren; the
fens of Lincolnshire flat and uninteresting, though admirably drained,
cultivated, and fertile. Ely Cathedral, of which I only saw the outside,
is magnificent, and the most perfect view of it is the one from the
railroad, as one comes from Lynn.

Lynn itself is a picturesque and curious old town, full of remains of
ancient monastic buildings. The railroad terminus is situated in a
property formerly part of a Carthusian convent, and the wheelwrights'
and blacksmiths' and carpenters' cottages are built partly in the old
monkish cells, of which two low ranges remain round a space now covered
with sleepers, and huge chains, and iron rails, and all the modern
materials of steam travel.

Cambridge, of course, I saw nothing of. On the road between it and Bury
St. Edmund's one passes over Newmarket heath, the aspect of which is
striking, apart from its "associations." Bury St. Edmund's--which is
famous, as you know, for its beautiful old churches and relics of monastic
greatness--I saw nothing of, but was most kindly and hospitably sheltered
by Mr. Donne, who, being now the father of sons, is living in Bury in
order to educate them at the school where he and my brothers were as boys
under Dr. Malki