iding person, I am of course as prone to anticipate all probable
evil as he is to forestall impossible good. He, my dear father, is,
I thank Heaven, splendidly well. He speaks of you always with much
delight, is charmed with your writings, and I do hope that you will
come to Reading and give him as well as me the great pleasure of
seeing you at our poor cottage by the roadside. You would like my
flower-garden. It is really a flower-garden becoming a duchess. People
are so good in ministering to this, my only amusement. And the effect
is heightened by passing through a labourer's cottage to get at it,
for such our poor hut literally is.

[Footnote 1: This gentleman was an old and highly valued friend of my
mother.]

"You have heard, I suppose, that Mr. Wordsworth's eldest son, who
married a daughter of Mr. Curwen, has lost nearly, if not quite, all
of his wife's portion by the sea flowing in upon the mine, and has now
nothing left but a living of 200_l._ given him by his father-in-law.
So are we all touched in turn.

"I have written to the Sedgwicks for the scarlet lilies mentioned by
Miss Martineau in her American book. Did you happen to see them in
their glory? of course they would flourish here; and having sent them
primroses, cowslips, ivy, and many other English wild flowers, which
took Theodore Sedgwick's fancy, I have a right to the return. How glad
I am to hear the good you tell me of my friend Tom. His fortune seems
now assured. My father's kindest regards.

"Ever my dear friend,

"Very faithfully yours,

"M.R. MITFORD.

"P.S.--Mr. Carey, the translator of Dante, has just been here. He
says that he visited Cowper's residence at Olney lately, and that his
garden room, which suggested mine, is incredibly small, and not
near so pretty. Come and see. You know, of course, that the 'Modern
Antiques' in _Our Village_ were Theodosia and Frances Hill, sisters of
Joseph Hill, cousins and friends of poor Cowper."

* * * * *

What the "good" was by which my "fortune was assured" I am unable
to guess. But I am sure of the sincerity of the writer's rejoicing
thereat.

Mary Mitford was a genuinely warm-hearted woman, and much of her talk
would probably be stigmatised by the young gentlemen of the present
generation, who consider the moral temperature of a fish to be "good
form," as "gush." How old Landor, who "gushed" from cradle to grave,
would have massacred and rended in his wrat