OXFORD, _26th October_ (1874).

Home at last with your lovely, most lovely, letter in my breast
pocket.

I am so very grateful to you for not writing on black paper.

Oh, dear Susie, why should we ever wear black for the guests of God?

* * * * *

WHARFE IN FLOOD.

BOLTON ABBEY,
_24th January, 1875_.

The black rain, much as I growled at it, has let me see Wharfe in
flood; and I would have borne many days in prison to see that.

No one need go to the Alps to see wild water. Seldom unless in the
Rhine or Rhone themselves at their rapids, have I seen anything much
grander. An Alpine stream, besides, nearly always has its bed full of
loose stones, and becomes a series of humps and dumps of water
wherever it is shallow; while the Wharfe swept round its curves of
shore like a black Damascus saber, coiled into eddies of steel. At the
Strid, it had risen eight feet vertical since yesterday, sheeting the
flat rocks with foam from side to side, while the treacherous
mid-channel was filled with a succession of boiling domes of water,
charged through and through with churning white, and rolling out into
the broader stream, each like a vast sea wave bursting on a beach.

There is something in the soft and comparatively unbroken slopes of
these Yorkshire shales which must give the water a peculiar sweeping
power, for I have seen Tay and Tummel and Ness, and many a big stream
besides, savage enough, but I don't remember anything so grim as this.

I came home to quiet tea and a black kitten called Sweep, who lapped
half my cream jugful (and yet I had plenty) sitting on my
shoulder,--and Life of Sir Walter Scott. I was reading his great
Scottish history tour, when he was twenty-three, and got his materials
for everything nearly, but especially for Waverley, though not used
till long afterwards.

Do you recollect Gibbie Gellatly? I was thinking over that question of
yours, "What did I think?"[13] But, my dear Susie, you might as well
ask Gibbie Gellatly what _he_ thought. What does it matter what any
of us think? We are but simpletons, the best of us, and I am a very
inconsistent and wayward simpleton. I know how to roast eggs, in the
ashes, perhaps--but for the next world! Why don't you ask your
squirrel what _he_ thinks too? The great point--the one for all of
us--is, not to take false words in o