st, as I could not have believed in, after a long story."

I shall be charmed to see you to-night.

Ever affectionately.

[Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.]

GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT,
_November 13th, 1865._

EXTRACT.

MY DEAR CERJAT,

Having achieved my book and my Christmas number, and having shaken
myself after two years' work, I send you my annual greeting. How are
you? Asthmatic, I know you will reply; but as my poor father (who was
asthmatic, too, and the jolliest of men) used philosophically to say,
"one must have something wrong, I suppose, and I like to know what it
is."

In England we are groaning under the brigandage of the butcher, which is
being carried to that height that I think I foresee resistance on the
part of the middle-class, and some combination in perspective for
abolishing the middleman, whensoever he turns up (which is everywhere)
between producer and consumer. The cattle plague is the butcher's
stalking-horse, and it is unquestionably worse than it was; but seeing
that the great majority of creatures lost or destroyed have been cows,
and likewise that the rise in butchers' meat bears no reasonable
proportion to the market prices of the beasts, one comes to the
conclusion that the public is done. The commission has ended very weakly
and ineffectually, as such things in England rather frequently do; and
everybody writes to _The Times_, and nobody does anything else.

If the Americans don't embroil us in a war before long it will not be
their fault. What with their swagger and bombast, what with their claims
for indemnification, what with Ireland and Fenianism, and what with
Canada, I have strong apprehensions. With a settled animosity towards
the French usurper, I believe him to have always been sound in his
desire to divide the States against themselves, and that we were
unsound and wrong in "letting I dare not wait upon I would." The Jamaica
insurrection is another hopeful piece of business. That
platform-sympathy with the black--or the native, or the devil--afar off,
and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in
the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark wild. Only the other
day, here was a meeting of jawbones of asses at Manchester, to censure
the Jamaica Governor for his manner of putting