How beautiful a day is to-day I cannot tell you!  It does refresh me!...  Head and spine very shaky this morning so that I could not get warm; but I wrapped in my fur cloak, and went out into the sunshine, up and down, up and down the churchyard flags.  A sunny old kirkyard is a nice place, I always think, for aged folk and invalids to creep up and down in, and “Tombstone Morality” isn’t half as wearing to the nerves as the problems of life!...

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Greno House, Tuesday.

Harry Howard drove me up yesterday.  It was just as much as I could bear; but I lay on the sofa till dinner, and went to bed at eight, and though my head kept me awake at first, I did well on the whole.  Breakfast in bed, a bigger one than I have eaten for three weeks, and since then I have had an hour’s drive.  The roughness of the roads is unlucky, but the air divine!  Such sweet sunshine, and Greno Wood, with yellow remains of bush and bracken, and heavy mosses on the sandstone walls, and tiny streams trickling through boggy bits of the wood, and coming out over the wall to overflow those picturesque stone troughs which are so oddly numerous, and which I had in my head when I wrote the first part of “Mrs. Overtheway.”

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January 11, 1880.

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Very dear to me are all your “tender and true” regards for the old home—­the grey-green nest (more grey now than green!) a good deal changed and weatherbeaten, but not quite deserted—­which is bound up with so much of our lives!  It is one of the points on which we feel very much alike, our love for things, and places, and beasts!!!  Another chord of sympathy was very strongly pulled by your writing of the “grey-green fields,” and sending your love to them.  No one I ever met has, I think, quite your sympathy with exactly what the external world of out-of-doors is to me and has been ever since I can remember.  From days when the batch of us went-out-walking with the Nurses, and the round moss-edged holes in the roots of gnarled trees in the hedges, and the red leaves of Herb Robert in autumn, and all the inexhaustible wealth of hedges and ditches and fields, and the Shroggs, and the brooks, were happiness of the keenest kind—­to now when it is as fresh and strong as ever; it has been a pleasure which has balanced an immense lot of physical pain, and which (between the affectation of the sort of thing being fashionable—­and other people being destitute of the sixth sense to comprehend it—­so that one feels a fool either way)—­one rarely finds any one to whom one can comfortably speak of it, and be understanded of them.  It is the one of my peculiarities which you have never doubted or misunderstood ever since we knew each other!  I fancy we must (as it happens) see those things very much alike.  That grey-green winter tone (for