This is an excellent plan of yours for bringing the whole family together round our dear old mother and her home daughter.  This is the end house of three on a little promontory, and has a charming view—­of the sea in the first place, and then on the one side of what is called by courtesy the parade, on the top of the sea wall where there is a broad walk leading to S. Clements, nearly two miles off.  There are not above a dozen houses altogether, and the hotel is taken for the two families from London and Oxford, while the Druces are to be in the house but one next to us, the middle one being unluckily let off to various inhabitants.  We have one bedroom free where we may lodge some of the overflowings, and I believe the whole party are to take their chief meals together in the large room at the hotel.  The houses are mostly scattered, being such as fortunate skippers build as an investment, and that their wives may amuse themselves with lodgers in their absence.  The church is the weakest point in this otherwise charming place.  The nearest, and actually the parish church, is a hideous compo structure, built in the worst of times as a chapel of ease to S. Clements.  I am afraid my mother’s loyalty to the parochial system will make her secure a pew there, though at the farther end of the town there is a new church which is all that can be wished, and about a mile and a half inland there is a village church called Hollyford, held, I believe, by a former fellow-curate of Horace Druce.  Perhaps they will exchange duties, if Horace can be persuaded to take a longer holiday than merely for the three weeks he has provided for at Bourne Parva.  They cannot come till Monday week, but our Oxford professor and his party come on Thursday, and Edith will bring her girls the next day.  Her husband, our Q.C., cannot come till his circuit is over, but of course you know more about his movements than I do.  I wonder you have never said anything about those girls of his, but I suppose you class them as unattainable.  I have said nothing to my mother or Emily of our plans, as I wish to be perfectly unbiased, and as I have seen none of the nieces for five years, and am prepared to delight in them all, I may be reckoned as a blank sheet as to their merits.—­Your affectionate sister,

Charlotte Fulford.

July 4.—­By noon to-day arrived Martyn, {127} with Mary his wife, Margaret and Avice their daughters, Uchtred their second son, and poor Harry Fulford’s orphan, Isabel, who has had a home with them ever since she left school.  Though she is only a cousin once removed, she seems to fall into the category of eligible nieces, and indeed she seems the obvious companion for us, as she has no home, and seems to me rather set aside among the others.  I hope there is no jealousy, for she is much better looking than her cousins, with gentle, liquid eyes, a pretty complexion, and a wistful expression.  Moreover, she is dressed in a quiet ladylike way, whereas