you?” We are all enjoying ourselves, you see, and I don’t have to eat six kinds of meat and two meat pies and—­currants!  They do; and may Heaven save ’em and get ’em home safe!

     [Illustration:  Col.  Edward M. House.  From a painting by P.A. 
     Laszlo]

     [Illustration:  The Rt.  Hon. Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister
     of Great Britain, 1908-1916]

It’s lovely in London now—­fine, shining days and showers at night and Ranelagh beautiful, and few people here; but I don’t deny its loneliness—­somewhat.  Yet sleep is good, and easy and long.  I have neither an ocean voyage nor six kinds of meat and two meat pies and currants.  I congratulate myself and write to you and mother.

You’ll land to-morrow or next day—­good; I congratulate you.  Salute the good land for me and present my respectful compliments to vegetables that have taste and fruit that is not sour—­to the sunshine, in fact, and to everything that ripens and sweetens in its glow.

And you’re now (when this reaches you) fixing up your home—­your own home, dear Kitty.  Bless your dear life, you left a home here—­wasn’t it a good and nice one?—­left it very lonely for the man who has loved you twenty-four years and been made happy by your presence.  But he’ll love you twenty-five more and on and on—­always.  So you haven’t lost that—­nor can you.  And it’s very fit and right that you should build your own nest; that adds another happy home, you see.  And I’m very sure it will be very happy always.  Whatever I can do to make it so, now or ever, you have only to say.  But—­your mother took your photograph with her and got it out of the bag and put it on the bureau as soon as she went to her room—­a photograph taken when you were a little girl.

     Hodson[18] came up to see me to-day and with tears of gratitude in
     his voice told me of the present that you and Chud had made him.  He
     is very genuinely pleased.  As for the rest, life goes on as usual.

I laugh as I think of all your new aunts and cousins looking you over and wondering if you’ll fit, and then saying to one another as they go to bed:  “She is lovely—­isn’t she?” I could tell ’em a thing or two if I had a whack at ’em.

And you’ll soon have all your pretty things in place in your pretty home, and a lot more that I haven’t seen.  I’ll see ’em all before many years—­and you, too!  Tell me, did Chud get you a dinner book?  Keep your record of things:  you’ll enjoy it in later years.  And you’ll have a nice time this autumn—­your new kinsfolk, your new friends and old and Boston and Cambridge.  If you run across Mr. Muffin, William Roscoe Thayer, James Ford Rhodes, President Eliot—­these are my particular old friends whose names occur at the moment.

     My love to you and Chud too,

     Affectionately,