to yours.  When do you intend to come and see me?  I can offer you a nest on the fourth story, which is excellent for your health, as free a circulation of air as a London lodging can well afford, and as fine a combination of chimney-pots as even your love of the picturesque could desire.

Dear H——­, will you not come and pass a month with us?  Now stop a bit, and I will point out to you one by one the inducements to and advantages of such a step.  In the first place, my father and mother both request and wish it, and you know how truly happy it would make me.  Your own people can well spare you for a month, and I am sure will be the more inclined to do so from the consideration that change of air and scene will be good for you, and that, though your stock of original ideas is certainly extraordinary, yet you cannot be expected to go on for ever, like a spider, existing mentally in the midst of your own weavings, without every now and then recruiting your strength and taking in a new supply of material.

You shall come to London, that huge mass of matter for thought and observation, and to me, in whom you find so interesting an epitome of all the moods, tenses, and conjugations of every regular and irregular form of “to do, to be, and to suffer;” and when you have been sufficiently smoked, fogged, astonished, and edified, you shall return home with one infallible result of your stay with us—­increased value for a peaceful life, quiet companions, a wide sea-view, and potatoes roasted in their skins; not but what you shall have the last-mentioned luxury here, if you will but come.

Now, dear H——­, I wish this very much, but promise to bear your answer reasonably well; I depend upon your indulging me if you can, and shall try not to behave ill if you don’t; so do me justice, and do not give way to your shyness and habits of retirement.  I want you to come here before the 20th of November, and then I will let you go in time to be at home for Christmas.  So now my cause is in your hands—­avisez-vous.

I wonder whether you have heard that my father has been thrashing the editor of the Age newspaper, who, it seems, took offence at my father’s not appearing on sufficiently familiar terms with him somewhere or other when they met, in revenge for which “coldness” (as he styles it) he has not ceased for the last six months abusing us, every week, in his paper.  From what I hear I was the especial mark of his malice; of course I need not tell you that, knowing the character of this publication, I should never have looked at it, and the circumstance of my name appearing in its columns would hardly have been an inducement to me to do so.  I knew nothing, therefore, of my own injuries, but heard general expressions of indignation against Mr. Westmacott, and saw that my father was extremely exasperated upon the subject.  The other night they were all