Yours, J.H.E.

TO MRS. JELF.

MY DEAREST MARNY,

Thank you, dear, with much love for your Easter card.  It is LOVELY (and Easter cards are not very beautiful as a rule).  It is on a little stand on my knick-knack table—­and looks so well!

I send you a few bits from my garden as an Easter Greeting.  They are not much—­but we are in a “nip” of bitter N.E. winds—­and nothing will “come out.”

Also I rather denuded my patch to send a large box to Undine to make the Easter wreaths for my Mother’s grave.  I was really rather proud of what I managed to scrape together—­every bit out of my very own patch—­and consequently of my very own planting!

I’ve got neuralgia to-day with the wind and a fourteen-miles drive for luncheon and two sets of callers since I got back!—­so I can’t write a letter—­but I want you to tell me when you think there’s a chance of your taking a run to see me!  I seem to have such lots to say!  I have found another charm (besides red pots) of our market.  If one goes very early on Saturday—­one gets such nice old-fashioned flowers, “roots,” and big ones too—­very cheap!  It’s a most fascinating ruination by penny-worths!

Good luck to you, dear, in your fresh settling down in the Heimath Land.

Mrs. M——­ (where we were lunching) asked tenderly after my large young family—­as strangers usually do.  Then she said, “But you write so sympathetically of children, and ‘A Soldier’s Children’ is so real—­I thought they MUST be yours.”  On which I explained the Dear Queers to her.  To whom be love! and to Richard.

Ever, dear, yours lovingly,
J.H.E.

TO MRS. GOING.

Midsummer Day, 1884.

MY DEAR MRS. GOING,

Not a moment till now have I found—­to tell you I got home safe and sound, and that your delicious cream was duly and truly appreciated!

The last of it was merged in an admirable Gooseberry Fool!

The roses suffered by the hot journey—­but even the least flourishing of them received great admiration—­from their size—­as the skeletons of saurians make a smaller world stand aghast!!!

This last sentence smacks of Jules Verne!  I don’t care much for him—­after all.  It is rather bookmaking.

But I have had a lot of hearty laughs over “the Heroine”!  It is very funny—­if not very refined.  Some of the situations admirable.  There is something in the girl’s calling her father “Wilkinson” all the way through—­quite as comic as anything in Vice Versa—­a book which I never managed to get to the end of.