is an arch you go in by, and we
nearly stuck and could go neither way. I was sorry to find the houses
looked so respectable, but Clo tells me she can take me to some much
better ones near Drury Lane. Dave, the boy, and his Uncle and Aunt, and
a little sister, Dolly, whom I nearly ate, live in the last house down
the Court. When we arrived Dolly was watering a sunflower, almost
religiously, in the front-garden eight feet deep. It would die vethy
thoon, she said, if neglected. She told us a long screed, about Heaven
knows what--I think it related to the sunflower, which a naughty boy had
chopped froo wiv a knife, and Dave had tighted on, successfully.

"The old prizefighter is just like Dr. Johnson, and I thought he was
going to hug Clo, he was so delighted to see her, and so affectionate.
So was Aunt Maria, a good woman who has lost her looks, but who must
have had some, twenty years ago. I got Dolly on my knee, and _we_ did
the hugging, Dolly telling me secrets deliciously, and tickling. She is
four next birthday, a fact which Aunt Maria thought should have produced
a sort of what the _Maestro_ calls _precisione_. I preferred Dolly as
she was, and we exchanged locks of hair.

"We had only been there a very short time when Uncle Moses suggested
that Dave should fetch a letter he was writing, from 'Old Mrs.
Prichard's Room' upstairs, and Dave--who is a dear little chap of six or
seven or eight--rushed upstairs to get it. I forgot how much I told you
about the family, but I know I said something in yesterday's letter.
Anyhow, 'old Mrs. Prichard' was not new to me, and I was very curious to
see her. So when more than five minutes had passed and no Dave
reappeared, I proposed that Dolly and I should go up to look for him,
and we went, Aunt Maria following in our wake, to cover contingencies.
She went back, after introducing me to the very sweet old lady in a
high-backed chair, who comes in as the explanation of the beginning of
this illegible scrawl. How funny children are! I do believe Uncle Moses
was right when he said that Dave, if anything, preferred his loves to be
'a bit elderly.' I am sure these babies see straight through wrinkles
and decay and toothless gums to the burning soul the old shell
imprisons, and love it. Do you recollect that picture in the Louvre we
both had seen, and thought the same about?--the old man with the sweet
face and the appalling excrescence on the nose, and the little boy's
unflinching love