s so he invariably
drops those initials and writes "Stella" or "Ppt" for the one, and "D" or
"Dingley" for the other. There is no exception to this anywhere. He is
anxious about Stella's "little eyes," and about her health generally;
whereas Dingley is strong. Poor Ppt, he thinks, will not catch the "new
fever," because she is not well; "but why should D escape it, pray?" And
Mrs. Dingley is rebuked for her tale of a journey from Dublin to Wexford.
"I doubt, Madam Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though not
so bad as Stella; she tells thumpers." Stella is often reproved for her
spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand. But she is a
puzzle-headed woman, like another. "What do you mean by my fourth
letter, Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say you had my fifth, goody
Blunder?" "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent slut to except
a letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage! No, little Dingley, I am
always in bed by twelve, and I take great care of myself." "You are a
pretending slut, indeed, with your 'fourth' and 'fifth' in the margin,
and your 'journal' and everything. O Lord, never saw the like, we shall
never have done." "I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish,
so everything." Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries for
his health. He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of his
prattle. Both women--MD--are rallied on their politics: "I have a fancy
that Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer."

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in his
lodgings. His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland.
"He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I say
nothing; I am as tame as a clout."

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, in
a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed
wife; so far so good. But two hundred years is long for her to have gone
stripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right. "Better, thanks to
MD's prayers," wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a private
fragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, nor
for any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all
the credit of those prayers, and all the thanks of that pious
benediction.

SOLITUDE

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization
has been kind