my prayers and wishes for your happiness which only can make mine.  Your journey cannot be to your disadvantage neither; you must needs be pleased to visit a place you are so much concerned in, and to be a witness yourself of your hopes, though I will believe you need no other inducements to this voyage than my desiring it.  I know you love me, and you have no reason to doubt my kindness.  Let us both have patience to wait what time and fortune will do for us; they cannot hinder our being perfect friends.

Lord, there were a thousand things I remembered after you were gone that I should have said, and now I am to write not one of them will come into my head.  Sure as I live it is not settled yet!  Good God! the fears and surprises, the crosses and disorders of that day, ’twas confused enough to be a dream, and I am apt to think sometimes it was no more.  But no, I saw you; when I shall do it again, God only knows!  Can there be a romancer story than ours would make if the conclusion prove happy?  Ah!  I dare not hope it; something that I cannot describe draws a cloud over all the light my fancy discovers sometimes, and leaves me so in the dark with all my fears about me that I tremble to think on’t.  But no more of this sad talk.

Who was that, Mr. Dr. told you I should marry?  I cannot imagine for my life; tell me, or I shall think you made it to excuse yourself.  Did not you say once you knew where good French tweezers were to be had?  Pray send me a pair; they shall cut no love.  Before you go I must have a ring from you, too, a plain gold one; if I ever marry it shall be my wedding ring; when I die I’ll give it you again.  What a dismal story this is you sent me; but who could expect better from a love begun upon such grounds?  I cannot pity neither of them, they were both so guilty.  Yes, they are the more to be pitied for that.

Here is a note comes to me just now, will you do this service for a fine lady that is my friend; have not I taught her well, she writes better than her mistress?  How merry and pleased she is with her marrying because there is a plentiful fortune; otherwise she would not value the man at all.  This is the world; would you and I were out of it:  for, sure, we were not made to live in it.  Do you remember Arme and the little house there?  Shall we go thither? that’s next to being out of the world.  There we might live like Baucis and Philemon, grow old together in our little cottage, and for our charity to some shipwrecked strangers obtain the blessing of dying both at the same time.  How idly I talk; ’tis because the story pleases me—­none in Ovid so much.  I remember I cried when I read it.  Methought they were the perfectest characters of a contented marriage, where piety and love were all their wealth, and in their poverty feasted the gods when rich men shut them out.  I am called away,—­farewell!

Your faithful.

Letter 49.—­The beginning of this letter is lost, and with it, perhaps, the name of Dorothy’s lover who had written some verses on her beauty.  However, we have the “tag” of them, with which we must rest content.