We play there every night next week. When next I write I will
tell you of our further plans, which are at this moment still
uncertain....

Affectionately yours,
F. A. K.

[These were the days before railroads had run everything and everybody
up to London. There were still to be found then, in various parts of
England, life that was peculiar and provincial, and manners that had in
them a character of their own and a stamp of originality that had often
quite as much to attract as to repel. Men and women are, of course,
still the same that sat to that enchanting painter, Jane Austen, but the
whole form and color and outward framing and various countenance of
their lives have merged its distinctiveness in a commonplace conformity
to universal custom; and in regard to the more superficial subjects of
her fine and gentle satire, if she were to return among us she would
find half her occupation gone.]

_Monday, August 1st._--I got some books while waiting for the
coach, and we started at half-past eight. The heat was intolerable
and the dust suffocating, but the country through which we passed
was lovely. For a long time we drove along the brow of a steep
hill. The valley was all glorious with the harvest: corn-fields
with the red-gold billows yet untouched by the sickle; others full
of sunburnt reapers sweeping down the ripe ears; others, again,
silent and deserted, with the tawny sheaves standing, bound and
dry, upon the bristling stubble, on the ground over which they
rippled and nodded yesterday, a great rolling sea of burnished
grain. All over the sunny landscape peace and prosperity smiled,
and gray-steepled churches and red-roofed villages, embowered in
thick protecting shade, seemed to beckon the eye to rest as it
wandered over the charming prospect. The white-walled mansions of
the lords of the land glittered from the verdant shelter of their
surrounding plantations, and the thirsty cattle, beautiful in color
and in grouping, stood in pools in the deeper parts of the brooks,
where some giant tree threw its shadow over the water and the
smooth sheltered sward round its feet. In spite of this charming
prospect I was very sad, and the purple heather bordering the road,
with its thick tufts, kept suggesting Weybridge and