St. Agnes’ House,

     Keppel Street,

     Chatsea.

     St. Mark’s Day.

     My dear Rector,

Thank you very much for sending me the money.  I’ve handed it over to a splendid fellow called Gurney who keeps all the accounts (private or otherwise) in the Mission House.  Poor chap, he’s desperately ill with asthma, and nobody thinks he can live much longer.  He suffers tortures, particularly at night, and as I sleep in the next room I can hear him.

You mustn’t think me inconsiderate because I haven’t written sooner, but I wanted to wait until I had seen a bit of this place before I wrote to you so that you might have some idea what I was doing and be able to realize that it is the one and only place where I ought to be at the moment.

But first of all before I say anything about Chatsea I want to try to express a little of what your kindness has meant to me during the last two years.  I look back at myself just before my sixteenth birthday when I was feeling that I should have to run away to sea or do something mad in order to escape that solicitor’s office, and I simply gasp!  What and where should I be now if it hadn’t been for you?  You have always made light of the burden I must have been, and though I have tried to show you my gratitude I’m afraid it hasn’t been very successful.  I’m not being very successful now in putting it into words.  I know my failure to gain a scholarship at Oxford has been a great disappointment to you, especially after you had worked so hard yourself to coach me.  Please don’t be anxious about my letting my books go to the wall here.  I had a talk about this with Father Rowley, who insisted that anything I am allowed to do in the district must only be done when I have a good morning’s work with my books behind me.  I quite realize the importance of a priest’s education.  One of the assistant priests here, a man called Snaith, took a good degree at Cambridge both in classics and theology, so I shall have somebody to keep me on the lines.  If I stay here three years and then have two years at Glastonbury I don’t honestly think that I shall start off much handicapped by having missed both public school and university.  I expect you’re smiling to read after one week of my staying here three years!  But I assure you that the moment I sat down to supper on the evening of my arrival I felt at home.  I think at first they all thought I was an eager young Ritualist, but when they found that they didn’t get any rises out of ragging me, they shut up.

This house is a most extraordinary place.  It is an old Congregational chapel with a gallery all round which has been made into cubicles, scarcely one of which is ever empty or ever likely to be empty so far as I can see!  I should think it must be rather like what the guest house of a monastery used to be like in the old days before the Reformation.  The ground floor