No, indeed, dearest Mrs. Martin.  If I do not say oftener that I have a strong and grateful trust in your affection for me, and therefore in your interest in all that concerns me, it is not that it is less strong and grateful.  What I said or sang of Miss Martineau’s letter was no consequence of a distrust of you, but of a feeling within myself that for me to show about such a letter was scarcely becoming, and, in the matter of modesty, nowise discreet.  I suppose I was writing excuses to myself for showing it to you.  I cannot otherwise account for the saying and singing.  And, for the rest, nobody can say or sing that I am not frank enough to you—­to the extent of telling all manner of nonsense about myself which can only be supposed to be interesting on the ground of your being presupposed to care a little for the person concerned.  Now am I not frank enough?  And by the way, I send you ’The Seraphim’[127] at last, by this day’s railroad.

Thursday.

To prove to you that I had not forgotten you before your letter came, here is the fragment of an unfinished one which I send you, to begin with—­an imperfect fossil letter, which no comparative anatomy will bring much sense out of—­except the plain fact that you were not forgotten....

From Alexandria we heard yesterday that they sailed from thence on the first of January, and the home passage may be long.

The changes in Mary Minto on account of mesmerism were merely imaginary as far as I can understand.  Nobody here observed any change in her.  Oh no.  These things will be fancied sometimes.  That she is an enthusiastic girl, and that the subject took strong hold upon her, is true enough, and not the least in the world—­according to my mind—­to be wondered at.  By the way, I had a letter and the present of a work on mesmerism—­Mr. Newnham’s—­from his daughter, who sent it to me the other day, in the kindest way, ‘out of gratitude for my poetry,’ as she says, and from a desire that it might do me physical good in the matter of health.  I do not at all know her.  I wrote to thank her, of course, for the kindness and sympathy which, as she expressed them, quite touched me; and to explain how I did not stand in reach just now of the temptations of mesmerism.  I might have said that I shrank nearly as much from these ‘temptations’ as from Lord Bacon’s stew of infant children for the purposes of witchcraft.

Well, then, I am getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with Robert Browning, poet and mystic, and we are growing to be the truest of friends.  If I live a little longer shut up in this room, I shall certainly know everybody in the world.  Mrs. Jameson came again yesterday, and was very agreeable, but tried vainly to convince me that the ‘Vestiges of Creation,’ which I take to be one of the most melancholy books in the world, is the most comforting, and that Lady Byron was an angel of a wife.  I persisted (in relation to the former clause) in a