remains is, a sort of consciousness, that we should be more comfortable in a house with cleaner carpets, and taken for rather longer than a week at a time.  Perhaps, after all, we are quite as well sur le tapis as it is.  It is a thousand to one but that the feeling of four red London walls closing around us for seven, eleven, or twenty-five years, would be a harsh and hard one, and make us cry wistfully to ‘get out.’  I am sure you will look up to your mountains, and down to your lakes, and enter into this conjecture.

Talking of mountains and lakes is itself a trying thing to us poor prisoners.  Papa has talked several times of taking us into the country for two months this summer, and we have dreamt of it a hundred times in addition; but, after all, we are not likely to go I dare say.  It would have been very delightful—­and who knows what may take place next summer?  We may not absolutely die, without seeing a tree.  Henrietta has seen a great many.  You will have heard, I dare say, of the enjoyment she had in her week at Camden House.  She seems to have walked from seven in the morning to seven at night; and was quite delighted with the kindness within doors and the sunshine without.  I assure you that, fresh as she was from the air and dew, she saluted us amidst the sentiment of our sisterly meeting just in this way—­it was almost her first exclamation—­’What a very disagreeable smell there is here!’ And this, although she had brought geraniums enough from Camden to perfume the Haymarket!...

I am happy to announce to you that a new little dove has appeared from a shell—­over which nobody had prognosticated good—­on August 16, 1837.  I and the senior doves appear equally delighted, and we all three, in the capacity of good sitters and indefatigable pullers-about, take a good deal of credit upon ourselves....

Arabel has begun oil painting, and without a master—­and you can’t think how much effect and expression she has given to several of her own sketches, notwithstanding all difficulties.  Poor Henrietta is without a piano, and is not to have one again until we have another house!  This is something like ‘when Homer and Virgil are forgotten.’ Speaking of Homer and Virgil, I have been writing a ’Romance of the Ganges,’[34] in order to illustrate an engraving in the new annual to be edited by Miss Mitford, Finden’s tableaux for 1838.  It does not sound a very Homeric undertaking—­I confess I don’t hold any kind of annual, gild it as you please, in too much honour and awe—­but from my wish to please her, and from the necessity of its being done in a certain time, I was ‘quite frightful,’ as poor old Cooke used to say, in order to express his own nervousness.  But she was quite pleased—­she is very soon pleased—­and the ballad, gone the way of all writing, now-a-days, to the press.  I do wish I could send you some kind of news that would interest you; but you see scarcely any except all this selfishness is in my beat.  Dearest Bro draws and reads German, and I fear is dull notwithstanding.  But we are every one of us more reconciled to London than we were.  Well!  I must not write any more.  Whenever you think of me, dearest Mrs. Martin, remember how deeply and unchangeably I must regard you—­both with my mind, my affections, and that part of either, called my gratitude.  BA.