(No date.)

How good and kind you are to me, dearest Mr. Fields! kindest of all,
I think, in writing me those.... One comfort is, that if London lose
you this year I do think you will not suffer many to elapse before
revisiting it. Ah, you will hardly find your poor old friend next
time! Not that I expect to die just now, but there is such a want of
strength, of the power that shakes off disease, which is no good
sign for the constitution. Yesterday I got up for a little while,
for the first time since I saw you; but, having let in too many
people, the fever came on again at night, and I am only just now
shaking off the attack, and feel that I must submit to perfect
quietness for the present. Still the attack was less violent than
the last, and unattended by sickness, so that I am really better and
hope in a week or so to be able to get out with you under the trees,
perhaps as far as Upton.

One of my yesterday's visitors was a glorious old lady of
seventy-six, who has lived in Paris for the last thirty years, and I
do believe came to England very much for the purpose of seeing me.
She had known my father before his marriage. He had taken her in his
hand (he was always fond of children) one day to see my mother; she
had been present at their wedding, and remembered the old
housekeeper and the pretty nursery-maid and the great dog too, and
had won with great difficulty (she being then eleven years old) the
privilege of having the baby to hold. Her descriptions of all these
things and places were most graphic, and you may imagine how much
she must have been struck with my book when it met her eye in Paris,
and how much I (knowing all about her family) was struck on my part
by all these details, given with the spirit and fire of an
enthusiastic woman of twenty. We had certainly never met. I left
Alresford at three years old. She made an appointment to spend a day
here next year, having with her a daughter, apparently by a first
husband. Also she had the same host of recollections of Louis
Napoleon, remembered the Emperor, as Premier Consul, and La Reine
Hortense as Mlle. de Beauharnais. Her account of the Prince is
favorable. She says that it is a most real popularity, and that, if
anything like durability can ever be predicated of the French, it
will prove a lasting one. I had