I cannot believe but that I should know you, notwithstanding all that time may have done:  there is not a feature of your face, could I meet it upon the road, by itself, that I should not instantly recollect.  I should say that is my Cousin’s nose, or those are her lips and her chin, and no woman upon earth can claim them but herself.  As for me, I am a very smart youth of my years; I am not indeed grown grey so much as I am grown bald.  No matter:  there was more hair in the world than ever had the honour to belong to me; accordingly having found just enough to curl a little at my ears, and to intermix with a little of my own that still hangs behind, I appear, if you see me in an afternoon, to have a very decent head-dress, not easily distinguished from my natural growth, which being worn with a small bag, and a black riband about my neck, continues to me the charms of my youth, even on the verge of age.  Away with the fear of writing too often!

PS.  That the view I give you of myself may be complete, I add the two following items—­That I am in debt to nobody, and that I grow fat.

TO THE SAME

The kindliness of thanks

30 Nov. 1785.

My dearest cousin,

Your kindness reduces me to a necessity (a pleasant one, indeed), of writing all my letters in the same terms:  always thanks, thanks at the beginning, and thanks at the end.  It is however, I say, a pleasant employment when those thanks are indeed the language of the heart:  and I can truly add, that there is no person on earth whom I thank with so much affection as yourself.  You insisted that I should give you my genuine opinion of the wine.  By the way, it arrived without the least damage or fracture, and I finished the first bottle of it this very day.  It is excellent, and though the wine which I had been used to drink was not bad, far preferable to that.  The bottles will be in town on Saturday.  I am enamoured of the desk and its contents before I see them.  They will be most entirely welcome.  A few years since I made Mrs. Unwin a present of a snuff-box—­a silver one; the purchase was made in London by a friend; it is of a size and form that make it more fit for masculine than feminine use.  She therefore with pleasure accepts the box which you have sent—­I should say with the greatest pleasure.  And I, discarding the leathern trunk that I have used so long, shall succeed to the possession of hers.  She says, Tell Lady Hesketh that I truly love and honour her.  Now, my Cousin, you may depend upon it, as a most certain truth, that these words from her lips are not an empty sound.  I never in my life heard her profess a regard for any one that she felt not.  She is not addicted to the use of such language upon ordinary occasions; but when she speaks it, speaks from the heart.  She has baited me this many a day, even as a bear is baited, to send for Dr. Kerr.  But,