or dear Haldimand, when I come back to Elysee. In any
case, however, don't discontinue your annual letter, because it has
become an expected and a delightful part of the season to me.

With one of the prettiest houses in London, and every conceivable (and
inconceivable) luxury in it, Townshend is voluntarily undergoing his own
sentence of transportation in Nervi, a beastly little place near Genoa,
where you would as soon find a herd of wild elephants in any villa as
comfort. He has a notion that he _must_ be out of England in the winter,
but I believe him to be altogether wrong (as I have just told him in a
letter), unless he could just take his society with him.

Workmen are now battering and smashing down my theatre here, where we
have just been acting a new play of great merit, done in what I may call
(modestly speaking of the getting-up, and not of the acting) an
unprecedented way. I believe that anything so complete has never been
seen. We had an act at the North Pole, where the slightest and greatest
thing the eye beheld were equally taken from the books of the Polar
voyagers. Out of thirty people, there were certainly not two who might
not have gone straight to the North Pole itself, completely furnished
for the winter! It has been the talk of all London for these three
weeks. And now it is a mere chaos of scaffolding, ladders, beams,
canvases, paint-pots, sawdust, artificial snow, gas-pipes, and
ghastliness. I have taken such pains with it for these ten weeks in all
my leisure hours, that I feel now shipwrecked--as if I had never been
without a play on my hands before. A third topic comes up as this
ceases.

Down at Gad's Hill, near Rochester, in Kent--Shakespeare's Gad's Hill,
where Falstaff engaged in the robbery--is a quaint little country-house
of Queen Anne's time. I happened to be walking past, a year and a half
or so ago, with my sub-editor of "Household Words," when I said to him:
"You see that house? It has always a curious interest for me, because
when I was a small boy down in these parts I thought it the most
beautiful house (I suppose because of its famous old cedar-trees) ever
seen. And my poor father used to bring me to look at it, and used to say
that if I ever grew up to be a clever man perhaps I might own that
house, or such another house. In remembrance of which, I have always in
passing looked to see if it was to be sold or let, and it has never been
to me like any other house, and it has n