can’t jog on.  It is New Year here.  That is, it was New Year half a year back, when I was writing this.  Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.  The Persian ambassador is the principal thing talked of now.  I sent some people to see him worship the sun on Primrose Hill at half past six in the morning 28th November; but he did not come, which makes me think the old fire-worshippers are a sect almost extinct in Persia.  Have you trampled on the Cross yet?  The Persian ambassador’s name is Shaw Ali Mirza.  The common people call him Shaw Nonsense.  While I think of it, I have put three letters besides my own three into the India post for you, from your brother, sister, and some gentleman whose name I forget.  Will they, have they, did they, come safe?  The distance you are at cuts up tenses by the root.

DEAR HOOD,—­If I have anything in my head I will send it to Mr. Watts.  Strictly speaking he should have had my Album verses, but a very intimate friend importuned me for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or lost sight at the time of his similar Souvenir.  Jamieson conveyed the farce from me to Mrs. C. Kemble, he will not be in town before the 27th.  Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn ourselves out right away from Colebrooke, where I had no health, and are about to domiciliate for good at Enfield, where I have experienced good.

“Lord what good hours do we keep! 
How quietly we sleep!”

See the rest in the Complete Angler.  We have got our books into our new house.  I am a drayhorse if I was not asham’d of the indigested dirty lumber as I toppled ’em out of the cart, and blest Becky that came with ’em for her having an unstuff’d brain with such rubbish.  We shall get in by Michael’s mass.  ’Twas with some pain we were evuls’d from Colebrook.  You may find some of our flesh sticking to the door posts.  To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I have died seven deaths.  But I don’t know whether every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence.  ’Tis an enterprise, and shoves back the sense of death’s approximating, which tho’ not terrible to me, is at all times particular distasteful.  My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time.  Cut off in the flower of Colebrook.  The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn.  Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it and rote us.  But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come and try it.  I heard she and you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble counter-action through the Table Book of last Saturday.  Has it not reach’d you, that you are silent about it?  Our new domicile is no manor house, but new, and externally