just now.

[Footnote 26: Part 5.]

* * * * *

BRANTWOOD.

I hope you did not get a chill in the garden. The weather is a little
wrong again, but I am thankful for last night's sunset.

You know our English Bible is only of James 1st time--Stalk is a Saxon
word, and gets into English I fancy as early as the Plantagenets--but
I have not hunted it down.--I'm just in the same mess with "pith," but
I'm finding out a great deal about the thing though not the word, for
next "Deucalion," in chopping my wood.

You know, "Funckia" won't last long. I am certain I shall have
strength enough to carry my system of nomenclature at least as far, as
to exclude people's individual names.

I won't even have a "Susia"--stay--that's Christian--yes, I will have
a Susia. But not a "Beeveria," though----

* * * * *

TO MISS BEEVER.

_20th January, 1879._

You will not doubt the extreme sorrow with which I have heard of all
that was ordered to be, of terrible, in your peaceful and happy
household. Without for an instant supposing, but, on the contrary,
utterly refusing to admit, that such calamities[27] may be used to
point a moral (all useful morality having every point that God meant
it to have, perfectly sharp and bright without any burnishing of
_ours_), still less to adorn a tale (the tales of modern days
depending far too much upon Scythian decoration with Death's heads),
I, yet, if I had been Mr. Chapman, would have pointed out that all
concealments, even of trivial matters, on the part of young servants
from kind mistresses, are dangerous no less than unkind and
ungenerous, and that a great deal of preaching respecting the evil
nature of man and the anger of God might be spared, if children and
servants were only taught, as a religious principle, to tell their
mothers and mistresses, when they go out, exactly where they are going
and what they are going to do. I think both you and Miss Susan ought
to use every possible means of changing, or at least checking, the
current of such thoughts in your minds; and I am in hopes that you may
have a little pleasure in examining the plates in the volume of
Sibthorpe's "F. Graeca" which I send to-day, in comparison with those
of "F. Danica." The vulgarity and lifelessness of Sibthorpe's plates
are the more striking because in mere execution they are