Others are yet more quaint, and more to my liking.  Nan-nan is Nan-nan:  I cannot let you off what she said!  No tears or sentiment came from her to prevent me laughing:  she brisked like an old war-horse at the first word of it, and blessed God that it had come betimes, that she might be a nurse again in her old age!  She is a true “Mrs. Berry,” and is ready to make room for you in my affections for the sake of far-off divine events, which promise renewed youth to her old bones.

Roberts, when he brought me my pony this morning, touched his hat quick twice over to show that the news brimmed in his body:  and a very nice cordial way of showing, I thought it!  He was quite ready to talk when I let him go; and he gave me plenty of good fun.  He used to know you when he was in service at the H——­s, and speaks of you as being then “a gallous young hound,” whatever that may mean.  I imagine “gallous” to be a rustic Lewis Carroll compound, made up in equal parts of callousness and gallantry, which most boys are, at some stage of their existence.

What tales will you be getting of me out of Nan-nan, some day behind my back, I wonder?  There is one I shall forbid her to reveal:  it shall be part of my marriage-portion to show you early that you have got a wife with a temper!

Here is a whole letter that must end now,—­and the great Word never mentioned!  It is good for you to be put upon maigre fare, for once.  I ho_l_d my pen back with b_o_th hands:  it wants so much to gi_v_e you the forbidd_e_n treat.  Oh, the serpent in the garden!  See where it has underlined its meaning.  Frailty, thy pen is a J pen!

Adieu, adieu, remember me.

LETTER XIII.

The letters?  No, Beloved, I could not!  Not yet.  There you have caught me where I own I am still shy of you.

A long time hence, when we are a safely wedded pair, you shall turn them over.  It may be a short time; but I will keep them however long.  Indeed I must ever keep them; they talk to me of the dawn of my existence,—­the early light before our sun rose, when my love of you was growing and had not yet reached its full.

If I disappoint you I will try to make up for it with something I wrote long before I ever saw you.  To-day I was turning over old things my mother had treasured for me of my childhood—­of days spent with her:  things of laughter as well as of tears; such a dear selection, so quaint and sweet, with moods of her as I dimly remember her to have been.  And among them was this absurdity, written, and I suppose placed in the mouth of my stocking, the Christmas I stayed with her in France.  I remember the time as a great treat, but nothing of this.  “Nilgoes” is “Nicholas,” you must understand!  How he must have laughed over me asleep while he read this!