SIR,—­It was, sure, a less fault in me to make a scruple of reading your letter to your brother, which in all likelihood I could not be concerned in, than for you to condemn the freedom you take of giving me directions in a thing where we are equally concerned.  Therefore, if I forgive you this, you may justly forgive me t’other; and upon these terms we are friends again, are we not?  No, stay!  I have another fault to chide you for.  You doubted whether you had not writ too much, and whether I could have the patience to read it or not.  Why do you dissemble so abominably; you cannot think these things?  How I should love that plain-heartedness you speak of, if you would use it; nothing is civil but that amongst friends.  Your kind sister ought to chide you, too, for not writing to her, unless you have been with her to excuse it.  I hope you have; and pray take some time to make her one visit from me, and carry my humble service with you, and tell her that ’tis not my fault that you are no better.  I do not think I shall see the town before Michaelmas, therefore you may make what sallies you please.  I am tied here to expect my brother Peyton, and then possibly we may go up together, for I should be at home again before the term.  Then I may show you my niece; and you may confess that I am a kind aunt to desire her company, since the disadvantage of our being together will lie wholly upon me.  But I must make it my bargain, that if I come you will not be frighted to see me; you think, I’ll warrant, you have courage enough to endure a worse sight.  You may be deceived, you never saw me in mourning yet; nobody that has will e’er desire to do it again, for their own sakes as well as mine.  Oh, ’tis a most dismal dress,—­I have not dared to look in the glass since I wore it; and certainly if it did so ill with other people as it does with me, it would never be worn.

You told me of writing to your father, but you did not say whether you had heard from him, or how he did.  May not I ask it?  Is it possible that he saw me?  Where were my eyes that I did not see him, for I believe I should have guessed at least that ’twas he if I had?  They say you are very like him; but ’tis no wonder neither that I did not see him, for I saw not you when I met you there.  ’Tis a place I look upon nobody in; and it was reproached to me by a kinsman, but a little before you came to me, that he had followed me to half a dozen shops to see when I would take notice of him, and was at last going away with a belief ’twas not I, because I did not seem to know him.  Other people make it so much their business to gape, that I’ll swear they put me so out of countenance I dare not look up for my life.

I am sorry for General Monk’s misfortunes, because you say he is your friend; but otherwise she will suit well enough with the rest of the great ladies of the times, and become Greenwich as well as some others do the rest of the King’s houses.  If I am not mistaken, that Monk has a brother lives in Cornwall; an honest gentleman, I have heard, and one that was a great acquaintance of a brother of mine who was killed there during the war, and so much his friend that upon his death he put himself and his family into mourning for him, which is not usual, I think, where there is no relation of kindred.