is full of stray dogs and tame rabbits and squirrels that run up you and look for nuts in your pocket.  There is also a mongoose, who pulled the cloth off the tea-table yesterday and ran away with all the cakes.  Aunt Marcia bears it philosophically, but the week before I came there was a crisis.  Aunt Winifred met some sheep on the road between here and our little town.  She asked where they were going to.  And the man with them said he was taking them to the slaughter-house.  She was horrified, and she bought them all—­there and then!  And half an hour later, she appeared here with the sheep, and Aunt Marcia was supposed to put them up in the garden.  Well, that was too much, and the aunts had words.  What happened to the sheep I don’t know.  Probably Aunt Winifred has eaten them since without knowing it.

“Dear Nora—­I wonder why I write you all these silly things when there is so much else to say—­and I know you want to hear it.  But it’s horribly difficult to begin.—­Well, first of all, Mr. Sorell and Otto Radowitz are about three miles from here, in a little vicarage that has a wide lookout upon the moors and a heavenly air.  The aunts have found me a horse, and I go there often.  Otto is in some ways very much better.  He lives an ordinary life, walks a fair amount, and is reading some classics and history with Mr. Sorell, besides endless books of musical theory and biography.  You know he passed his first musical exam last May.  For the second, which will come off next year, he has to write a composition in five-part harmony for at least five stringed instruments, and he is beginning work for it now.  He writes and writes, and his little study at the vicarage is strewn deep in scribbled music-paper.  With his left hand and his piano he does wonders, but the poor right hand is in a sling and quite useless, up to now.  He reads scores endlessly, and he said to me yesterday that he thought his intellectual understanding of music—­his power of grasping it through the eye—­of hearing it with the mind—­’ditties of no tone!’—­had grown since his hand was injured.  But the pathetic thing is that the sheer pleasure—­the joy and excitement—­of his life is gone; those long hours of dreaming and composing with the piano, when he could not only make himself blissfully happy, but give such exquisite pleasure to others.

“He is very quiet and patient now—­generally—­and quite determined to make a name for himself as a composer.  But he seems to me extraordinarily frail.  Do you remember that lovely French poem of Sully Prudhomme’s I read you one night—­’Le Vase Brise’?  The vase has had a blow.  No one knew of it.  But the little crack widens and grows.  The water ebbs away—­the flowers die. ‘Il est brise—­n’y touchez pas!’ I can see it is just that Mr. Sorell feels about Otto.

“What makes one anxious sometimes, is that he has hours of a kind of fierce absent-mindedness, when his real self seems to be far away—­as though in some feverish or ugly dream.  He goes away and wanders about by himself.  Mr. Sorell does not attempt to follow him, though he is always horribly anxious.  And after some hours he comes back, limp and worn out, but quite himself again—­as though he had gone through some terrible wrestle and escaped.