ying.
The last I saw of that "Old Mortality" was sitting with him one
bright sunset under his cottage porch, singing to him and dressing
his hat with flowers, poor old man! yet after walking this earth
upward of ninety-seven years the spirit as well as the flesh must
be weary. His cottage will lose half its picturesqueness without
his figure at the door; I wonder who will take care now of the
roses he was so fond of, and the pretty little garden I used to
forage in for lilies of the valley and strawberries! I shall never
see him again, which makes me sad; I was often deeply struck by the
quaint wisdom of that old human relic, and his image is associated
in my thoughts with evening walks and summer sunsets and lovely
flowers and lordly trees, and he will haunt Cassiobury always to
me. I went with my mother to buy my dresses for "Hernani," which
will cost me a fortune and a half.

GREAT RUSSELL STREET, Saturday.
MY DEAREST H----,

You see I have taken your advice, and, moreover, your paper, in
order that, in spite of the dispersion of Parliament and the
unattainability of franks, our correspondence may lose nothing in
bulk, though it must in frequency. I think you are behaving very
shabbily in not writing to me. Are you consulting your own
pleasure, or my purse? I dedicate so much of my income to purposes
which go under the head of "money thrown away;" don't you think the
cost of our correspondence may be added to that without seriously
troubling my conscience? What shall I say to you? "Reform" is on
the tip of my pen, and great as are our private matters of anxiety,
they scarcely outweigh in our minds the national interest that is
engrossing almost every thinking person throughout the country. You
know I am no politician, and my shallow causality and want of
adequate information alike unfit me from understanding, much less
discussing, public questions of great importance; but the present
crisis has aroused me to intense interest and anxiety about the
course events are taking. You can have no conception of the state
of excitement prevailing in London at this moment. The scene in the
House of Lords immediately preceding the dissolution the papers
will have described to you, though if the spectators and
p