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Ecclesfield. August 24, 1881.

...  Andre has made the “rough-book” (water colours) of “A week spent in a Glass Pond, By the Great Water Beetle.”  I only had it a few hours, but I scrambled a bit of the title-page on to the enclosed sheet of green paper for you to see.  It is entirely in colours.  The name of the tale is beautifully done in letters, the initials of which bud and blossom into the Frogbit (which shines in white masses on the Aldershot Canal!) [Sketch.] To the left the “Water Soldier” (Stratiotes Aloides) with its white blossoms.  At the foot of the page “the Great Water Beetle” himself, writing his name in the book—­Dyticus Marginalis.  There is another blank page at the beginning of the book, where the beetle is standing blacking himself in a penny ink-pot!!!! and another where he is just turning the leaves of a book with his antennae—­the book containing the name of the chromolithographers.  He has adopted almost all my ideas, and I told him (though it is not in the tale) “I should like a dog to be with the children in all the pictures, and a cat to be with the old naturalist,”—­and he has such a dog (a white bull terrier) [sketch], who waits on the woodland path for them in one picture, noofles in the colander at the water-beasts in another, examines the beetle in a third, stands on his hind legs to peep into the aquarium in a fourth, etc.  But I cannot describe it all to you.  I have asked to have it again by and by, and will send you a coloured sketch or two from it.  I am so much pleased!...  Perhaps the best part of the book is the cover.  It is very beautiful.  The Bell Glass Aquarium (lights in the water beautifully done) carries the title, and reeds, flowers, newts, beetles, dragon-flies, etc., etc., are grouped with wondrous fancy!  This entirely his own design....

Jesmond Dene, Newcastle-on-Tyne. August 30, 1881.

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The four Jones children and their nurse are in lodgings at a place called Whitley on the coast, not far from here.  Somebody from here goes to see them most days.  To-day Mrs. J. and I went.  As we were starting dear “Bob” (the collie who used to belong to the Younghusbands) was determined to go.  Mrs. Jones said No.  He bolted into the cab and crouched among my petticoats; I begged for him, and he was allowed.  At the station he was in such haste he would jump into a 2nd class carriage, and we had hard work to get him out. (This is rather funny, because she usually goes there 2nd class with the children:  and he looked at the 1st and would hardly be persuaded to get in.) Well, the coast is rather like Filey, and such a wind was blowing, and such white horses foamed and fretted, and sent up wildly tossed fountains of foam against the rocks, and such grey and white waves swallowed