(I am stubbornly indifferent to the Spectator’s dictum that we like “Sir Joshuas” because we are a nation of snobs!!!)

Ever affectionately yours,
JULIANA HORATIA EWING.

Do tell me what hope there is of seeing you—­and showing you your own bramble on my own wall!

TO MRS. GOING.

March 11, 1884.

MY DEAR MRS. GOING,

I do not think you will ever let me have my Head Gardener here again!

I CAN’T take care of him!

I really could have sat down on the door-step and cried—­when our old cabby—­“the family coachman” as we call him, arrived and had missed Mr. Going.  How he did not miss his train, I cannot conceive!  He must have run—­he must have flown—­he must be a bit uncanny—­and the flap-ends of the comforter must have spread into wings—­or our clocks must have been beforehand—­or the trains were behindhand—­

Obviously luck favours him!!

But where was his great-coat?—­

He got very damp—­and there was no time to hang him out to dry!

Tell him with my love—­I have been nailing up the children in the way they should go—­and have made a real hedge of cuttings!

I wish the Weeding Woman could see my old Yorkshire “rack.”  It and its china always lend themselves to flowers, I think.  The old English coffee-cups are full of primroses.  In a madder-crimson Valery pot are Lent lilies—­and the same in a peacock-blue fellow of a pinched and selfish shape.  The white violets are in a pale grey-green jar (a miniature household jar) of Marseilles pottery.  The polyanthuses singularly become a pet Jap pot of mine of pale yellow with white and black design on it—­and a gold dragon—­and a turquoise-coloured lower rim.

I am VERY flowery.  I must catch the post.  I do hope my Head Gardener is not in bed with rheumatic fever!!!!  I trust your poor back is rather easier?

Please most gratefully thank the girls for me.

Yours gratefully and affectionately,
J.H.E.

TO THE REV.  J. GOING.

All Fools, 1884.

MY DEAR HEAD GARDENER,

You are too good, and—­as to the confusion of one’s principles is sometimes the case—­your virtues encourage my vices.  You make me greedy when I ought only to be grateful.

I’ve been too busy to write at once, and also somewhat of set purpose abstained—­for those bitter winds and hard-caked soil were not suited for transplantation, and still less fit for you to be playing the part of Honest Root-gatherer without your Cardigan Waistcoat!!!!

To-day

     “a balmy south wind blows.”

I feel convinced some poet says so.  If not I do, and it’s a fact.