s Christmas, and have had enough to do. My boys are now
all dispersed in South America, India, and Australia, except Charley,
whom I have taken on at "All the Year Round" Office, and Henry, who is
an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, and I hope will make his mark there.
All well.

The Thames Embankment is (faults of ugliness in detail apart) the finest
public work yet done. From Westminster Bridge to near Waterloo it is now
lighted up at night, and has a fine effect. They have begun to plant it
with trees, and the footway (not the road) is already open to the
Temple. Besides its beauty, and its usefulness in relieving the crowded
streets, it will greatly quicken and deepen what is learnedly called
the "scour" of the river. But the Corporation of London and some other
nuisances have brought the weirs above Twickenham into a very bare and
unsound condition, and they already begin to give and vanish, as the
stream runs faster and stronger.

Your undersigned friend has had a few occasional reminders of his "true
American catarrh." Although I have exerted my voice very much, it has
not yet been once touched. In America I was obliged to patch it up
constantly.

I like to read your patriarchal account of yourself among your Swiss
vines and fig-trees. You wouldn't recognise Gad's Hill now; I have so
changed it, and bought land about it. And yet I often think that if Mary
were to marry (which she won't) I should sell it and go genteelly
vagabondising over the face of the earth. Then indeed I might see
Lausanne again. But I don't seem in the way of it at present, for the
older I get, the more I do and the harder I work.

Yours ever affectionately.

[Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.]

OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND,"
_Wednesday, Jan. 6th, 1869._

MY DEAR MARY,

I was more affected than you can easily believe, by the sight of your
gift lying on my dressing-table on the morning of the new year. To be
remembered in a friend's heart when it is sore is a touching thing; and
that and the remembrance of the dead quite overpowered me, the one being
inseparable from the other.

You may be sure that I shall attach a special interest and value to the
beautiful present, and shall wear it as a kind of charm. God bless you,
and may we carry the friendship through many coming years!

My preparations for a certain murder tha