y. You see my taste for roads is hereditary.

_Friday._--I was wakened this morning by a long flourish of bugles and a
roll upon the drums--the _reveille_ at the Castle. I went to the window;
it was a grey, quiet dawn, a few people passed already up the street
between the gardens, already I heard the noise of an early cab somewhere
in the distance, most of the lamps had been extinguished but not all,
and there were two or three lit windows in the opposite facade that
showed where sick people and watchers had been awake all night and knew
not yet of the new, cool day. This appealed to me with a special
sadness: how often in the old times my nurse and I had looked across at
these, and sympathised!

I wish you would read Michelet's _Louis Quatorze et la Revocation de
l'Edit de Nantes_. I read it out in the garden, and the autumnal trees
and weather, and my own autumnal humour, and the pitiable prolonged
tragedies of Madame and of Moliere, as they look, darkling and sombre,
out of their niches in the great gingerbread facade of the _Grand Age_,
go wonderfully hand in hand.

I wonder if my revised paper has pleased the Saturday? If it has not, I
shall be rather sorry--no, very sorry indeed--but not surprised and
certainly not hurt. It will be a great disappointment; but I am glad to
say that, among all my queasy, troublesome feelings, I have not a
sensitive vanity. Not that I am not as conceited as you know me to be;
only I go easy over the coals in that matter.

I have been out reading Hallam in the garden; and have been talking with
my old friend the gardener, a man of singularly hard favour and few
teeth. He consulted me this afternoon on the choice of books, premising
that his taste ran mainly on war and travel. On travel I had to own at
once my ignorance. I suggested Kinglake, but he had read that; and so,
finding myself here unhorsed, I turned about and at last recollected
Southey's _Lives of the Admirals_, and the volumes of Macaulay
containing the wars of William. Can you think of any other for this
worthy man? I believe him to hold me in as high an esteem as any one can
do; and I reciprocate his respect, for he is quite an intelligent
companion.

On Saturday morning I read Morley's article aloud to Bob in one of the
walks of the public garden. I was full of it and read most excitedly;
and we were ever, as we went to and fro, passing a bench where a man sat
reading the Bible aloud to a small circle of the devout