penmanship was not of a rapid order, it cost me a good deal of
trouble. When it was finished it ran thus:

MY DEAR PAPA,

I hope you are quite well. i am quite well. Rubens is here
and he is quite well. We dont no how he got here but i am
verry glad. Ant Maria said well he cant be sent back now so
he sleeps on my bed and i like London it is a kweer place
the houses are very big and i like my cussens pretty well
they are all gals their nozes are very big i like Polly.

Nurse is quite well so good-bye.

i am your very loving son,

REGINALD DACRE.

Though I cannot defend the spelling of the above document, I must say
that it does not leave much to be added to the portrait of my cousins.
But it will be more polite to introduce them separately, as they were
presented to me.

I heard them, by the bye, before I saw them. It was whilst I was
dressing, the morning after my arrival, that I heard sounds in the
room below, which were interpreted by Nurse as being "Miss Maria
doing her music." The peculiarity of Miss Maria's music was that after
a scramble over the notes, suggestive of some one running to get
impetus for a jump, and when the ear waited impatiently for the
consummation, Miss Maria baulked her leap, so to speak, and got no
farther, and began the scramble again, and stuck once more, and so on.
And as, whilst finding the running passage quite too much for one
hand, she struggled on with a different phrase in the other hand at
the same time, instead of practising the two hands separately, her
chances of final success seemed remote indeed. Then I heard the
performance in peculiar circumstances. Nurse Bundle had opened my
window, and about two minutes after my cousin commenced her practice,
an organ-grinder in the street below began his. The subject of poor
Maria's piece knew no completion, as she stuck halfway; but the
organ-grinder's melodies only stopped for a touch to the mechanism,
and Black-Eyed Susan passed into the Old Hundredth, awkwardly, but
with hardly a perceptible pause. The effect of the joint performance
was at first ludicrous, and by degrees maddening, especially when we
had come to the Old Hundredth, which was so familiar in connection
with the words of the Psalm.

"Three and four and--" began poor Maria afresh, with desperate
resolution; and then off she went up the key-board; "one and two and
three and four and, one and two and three and four and--"

"--joy--