to come and hear it, among the rest, your handsome countrywoman,
Mrs. R---- S----. It was very pleasant, with that agreeable
intermixture of tragedy and comedy that tells so well when
judiciously managed. He will not print them for some time to come,
intending to read them at some of the principal places in England,
and perhaps Scotland.

"What are you doing in America? You are too happy and independent!
'O fortunatos Agricolas, sua si bona norint!' I am not quite sure of
my Latin (which is rusty from old age), but I am sure of the
sentiment, which is that when people are too happy, they don't know
it, and so take to quarrelling to relieve the monotony of their
blue sky. Some of these days you will split your great kingdom in
two, I suppose, and then--

"My wife's mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, is very ill, and we are
apprehensive of a fatal result, which, in truth, the mere fact of
her age (eighty-two or eighty-three) is enough to warrant. Ah, this
terrible _age_! The young people, I dare say, think that we live too
long. Yet how short it is to look back on life! Why, I saw the house
the other day where I used to play with a wooden sword when I was
five years old! It cannot surely be eighty years ago! What has
occurred since? Why, nothing that is worth putting down on paper. A
few nonsense verses, a flogging or two (richly deserved), and a few
white-bait dinners, and the whole is reckoned up. Let us begin
again." [Here he makes some big letters in a school-boy hand, which
have a very pathetic look on the page.]

In a letter written in 1856 he gives me a graphic picture of sad times
in India:--

"All our anxiety here at present is the Indian mutiny. We ourselves
have great cause for trouble. Our son (the only son I have, indeed)
escaped from Delhi lately. He is now at Meerut. He and four or five
other officers, four women, and a child escaped. The men were
obliged to drop the women a fearful height from the walls of the
fort, amidst showers of bullets. A round shot passed within a yard
of my son, and one of the ladies had a bullet through her shoulder.
They were seven days and seven nights in the jungle, without money
or meat, scarcely any clothes, no shoes. They forded rivers, lay on
the wet ground at night, lapped water from the puddles, and finally
reached Meerut. The lady (the