My dear E—­, How often you must find yourself in want of a pin!  For instance, you go into a shop, and you say to the man, “I want the largest penny bun you can let me have for a halfpenny.”  And perhaps the man looks stupid, and doesn’t quite understand what you mean.  Then how convenient it is to have a pin ready to stick into the back of his hand, while you say, “Now then!  Look sharp, stupid!"... and even when you don’t happen to want a pin, how often you think to yourself, “They say Interlacken is a very pretty place.  I wonder what it looks like!” (That is the place that is painted on this pincushion.)

When you don’t happen to want either a pin or pictures, it may just remind you of a friend who sometimes thinks of his dear little friend E—­, and who is just now thinking of the day he met her on the parade, the first time she had been allowed to come out alone to look for him....

    December 26, 1886.

My dear E—­, Though rushing, rapid rivers roar between us (if you refer to the map of England, I think you’ll find that to be correct), we still remember each other, and feel a sort of shivery affection for each other....

    March 31, 1890.

I do sympathise so heartily with you in what you say about feeling shy with children when you have to entertain them!  Sometimes they are a real terror to me—­especially boys:  little girls I can now and then get on with, when they’re few enough.  They easily become “de trop.”  But with little boys I’m out of my element altogether.  I sent “Sylvie and Bruno” to an Oxford friend, and, in writing his thanks, he added, “I think I must bring my little boy to see you.”  So I wrote to say “don’t,” or words to that effect:  and he wrote again that he could hardly believe his eyes when he got my note.  He thought I doted on all children.  But I’m not omnivorous!—­like a pig.  I pick and choose....

You are a lucky girl, and I am rather inclined to envy you, in having the leisure to read Dante—­I have never read a page of him; yet I am sure the “Divina Commedia” is one of the grandest books in the world—­though I am not sure whether the reading of it would raise one’s life and give it a nobler purpose, or simply be a grand poetical treat.  That is a question you are beginning to be able to answer:  I doubt if I shall ever (at least in this life) have the opportunity of reading it; my life seems to be all torn into little bits among the host of things I want to do!  It seems hard to settle what to do first.  One piece of work, at any rate, I am clear ought to be done this year, and it will take months of hard work:  I mean the second volume of “Sylvie and Bruno.”  I fully mean, if I have life and health till Xmas next, to bring it out then.  When one is close on sixty years old, it seems presumptuous to count on years and