My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­Waiting first for you to write to me, and then waiting that I might write to you cheerfully, has ended by making so long a silence that I am almost ashamed to break it.  And perhaps, even if I were not ashamed, you would be angry—­perhaps you are angry, and don’t much care now whether or not you ever hear from me again.  Still I must write, and I must moreover ask you to write to me again; and I must in particular assure you that I have continued to love you sincerely, notwithstanding all the silence which might seem to say the contrary.  What I should like best just now is to have a letter speaking comfortable details of your being comparatively well again; yet I hope on without it that you really are so much better as to be next to quite well.  It was with great concern that I heard of the indisposition which hung about you, dearest Mrs. Martin, so long—­I who had congratulated myself when I saw you last on the promise of good health in your countenance.  May God bless you, and keep you better!  And may you take care of yourself, and remember how many love you in the world, from dear Mr. Martin down to—­E.B.B.

Well, now I must look around me and consider what there is to tell you.  But I have been uneasy in various ways, sometimes by reason and sometimes by fantasy; and even now, although my dear old friend Dr. Scully is something better, he lies, I fear, in a very precarious state, while dearest Miss Mitford’s letters from the deathbed of her father make my heart ache as surely almost as the post comes.  There is nothing more various in character, nothing which distinguishes one human being from another more strikingly, than the expression of feeling, the manner in which it influences the outward man.  If I were in her circumstances, I should sit paralysed—­it would be impossible to me to write or to cry.  And she, who loves and feels with the intensity of a nature warm in everything, seems to turn to sympathy by the very instinct of grief, and sits at the deathbed of her last relative, writing there, in letter after letter, every symptom, physical or moral—­even to the very words of the raving of a delirium, and those, heart-breaking words!  I could not write such letters; but I know she feels as deeply as any mourner in the world can.  And all this reminds me of what you once asked me about the inscriptions in Lord Brougham’s villa at Nice.  There are probably as many different dialects for the heart as for the tongue, are there not?...

And now you will kindly like to have a word said about myself, and it need not be otherwise than a word to give your kindness pleasure.  The long splendid summer, exhausting as the heat was to me sometimes, did me essential good, and left me walking about the room and equal to going downstairs (which I achieved four or five times), and even to going out in the chair, without suffering afterwards.  And, best of all, the spitting of blood (I must tell you), which