me correspondent, a letter delightfully fresh in tone
and full of her personality:--

In a few days I trust--you know I am a great truster--you will
receive a packet franked by Lord Bathurst, containing only a little
pocket-book--_Friendship's Offering for 1825_, dizened out. I fear
you will think it too fine for your taste, but there is in it, as
you will find, the old _Mental Thermometer_, which was once a
favorite of yours. You will wonder how it came there. Simply thus:
Last autumn came by the coach a parcel containing just such a book
as this for last year, and a letter from Mr. Lupton Relfe--a
foreigner settled in London--and he prayed in most polite
bookseller strain that I would look over my portfolio for some
trifle for this book for 1825. I might have looked over "my
portfolio" till doomsday, as I have not an unpublished scrap,
except _Taken for Granted_. But I recollected the _Mental
Thermometer_, and that it had never been _out_, except in the
_Irish Farmer's Journal_, not known in England. So I routed in the
garret, under pyramids of old newspapers, with my mother's
prognostics that I never should find it, and loud prophecies that I
should catch my death, which I did not; but dirty and dusty and
cobwebby, I came forth, after two hours' groveling, with my object
in my hand; cut it out, added a few lines of new end to it, and
packed it off to Lupton Relfe, telling him that it was an old thing
written when I was sixteen. Weeks elapsed, and I heard no more,
when there came a letter exuberant in gratitude, and sending a
parcel containing six copies of the new memorandum-book, and a most
beautiful twelfth edition of Scott's poetical works, bound in the
most elegant manner, and with most beautifully engraved
frontispieces and vignettes, and a L5 note. I was quite
ashamed--but I have done all I could for him by giving the
_Friendship's Offering_ to all the fine people I could think of.
The set of Scott's works made a nice New Year's gift for Harriet;
she had seen this edition at Edinburgh and particularly wished for
it. The L5 note I have sent to Harriet Beaufort to be laid out in
books for Fanny Stewart. Little did I think the poor old
_Thermometer_ would give me so much pleasure. Here comes the
carriage rolling round. I feel guilty. What wil