ly fine earnest
fellow), "this reminds me so of one of my dearest friends, with a
melancholy so curious, that I don't know whether the place feels
familiar to me or strange." He was full of interest directly, and we
went on talking of you until the moment of his getting up to open the
business.

They are going to print my speech in a tract-form, and send it all over
the country. I corrected it for the purpose last night. We are all well.
Charley in the City; all the boys at home for the holidays; three prizes
brought home triumphantly (one from the Boulogne waters and one from
Wimbledon); I taking dives into a new book, and runs at leap-frog over
"Household Words;" and Anne going to be married--which is the only bad
news.

Catherine, Georgie, Mary, Katey, Charley, and all the rest, send
multitudes of loves. Ever, my dearest Macready, with unalterable
affection and attachment,

Your faithful Friend.

[Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.]

3, ALBION VILLAS, FOLKESTONE, _Tuesday, July 17th, 1855._

MY DEAR COLLINS,

Walter goes back to school on the 1st of August. Will you come out of
school to this breezy vacation on the same day, or rather _this day
fortnight, July 31st_? for that is the day on which he leaves us, and we
begin (here's a parent!) to be able to be comfortable. Why a boy of that
age should seem to have on at all times a hundred and fifty pair of
double-soled boots, and to be always jumping a bottom stair with the
whole hundred and fifty, I don't know. But the woeful fact is within my
daily experience.

We have a very pleasant little house, overlooking the sea, and I think
you will like the place. It rained, in honour of our arrival, with the
greatest vigour, yesterday. I went out after dinner to buy some nails
(you know the arrangements that would be then in progress), and I
stopped in the rain, about halfway down a steep, crooked street, like a
crippled ladder, to look at a little coachmaker's, where there had just
been a sale. Speculating on the insolvent coachmaker's business, and
what kind of coaches he could possibly have expected to get orders for
in Folkestone, I thought, "What would bring together fifty people now,
in this little street, at this little rainy minute?" On the instant, a
brewer's van, with two mad horses in it, and the harness dangling about
them--like the trappings of those horses you are acquainted with, who
bolt