I meant to write a long letter to you to-day, but Mr. Kenyon has been to see me and cut my time short before post time.  You remember, perhaps, how his brother married a German, and, after an exile of many years in Germany, returned last summer to England to settle.  Well, he can’t bear us any longer!  His wife is growing paler and paler with the pressure of English social habits, or rather unsocial habits; and he himself is a German at heart; and besides, being a man of a singularly generous nature, and accustomed to give away in handfuls of silver and gold one-third of every year’s income, he dislikes the social obligation of spending it here.  So they are going back.  Poor Mr. Kenyon!  I am full of sympathy with him.  This returning to England was a dream of all last year to him.  He gave up his house to the new comers, and bought a new one; and talked of the brightness secured to his latter years by the presence of his only remaining near relative; and I see that, for all his effort towards a bright view of the matter, he is disappointed—­very.  Should you suppose that four hundred pounds in Vienna go as far as a thousand in England?  I should never have fancied it.

You shall hear from me, my dearest Mrs. Martin, in another few days; and I send this as it is, just because I am benighted by the post hour, and do not like to pass your kindness with even one day’s apparent neglect.

May God bless you and dear Mr. Martin.  The kindest wishes for the long slope of coming year, and for the many, I trust, beyond it, belong to you from the deepest of our hearts.

But shall you not be coming—­setting out—­very soon, before I can write again?

Your affectionate
BA.

To John Kenyan [?January 1844.]

I am so sorry, dear Mr. Kenyon, to hear—­which I did, last night, for the first time—­of your being unwell.  I had hoped that to-day would bring a better account, but your note, with its next week prospect, is disappointing.  The ‘ignominy’ would have been very preferable—­to us, at least, particularly as it need not have lasted beyond to-day, dear Georgie being quite recovered, and at his law again, and no more symptoms of small-pox in anybody.  We should all be well, if it were not for me and my cough, which is better, but I am not quite well, nor have yet been out.

A letter came to me from dear Miss Mitford a few days since, which I had hoped to talk to you about.  Some of the subject of it is Mr. Kenyon’s ‘only fault,’ which ought, of course, to be a large one to weigh against the multitudinous ones of other people, but which seems to be:  ’He has the habit of walking in without giving notice.  He thinks it saves trouble, whereas in a small family, and at a distance from a town, the effect is that one takes care to be provided for the whole time that one expects him, and then, by some exquisite ill luck, on the only day when one’s larder is empty, in he comes!’ And so, if you have not written to interrupt her in this process of indefinite expectation, the ‘only fault’ will, in her eyes, grow, as it ought, as large as fifty others.