we hope you will get your letters—­’Poor boy, poor, dear boy!’ In short, notwithstanding all the affectionate interest I take in you, this is sometimes too much for me.  In fact, I think I must be very fond of thee not to have grown positively to hate thee for all this fuss.  There!  In this last sentence, instead of saying you, I have said thee!  That ought to gild the pill for you!

“We do not go very frequently to visit Treport, except to invoke for you the protection of Heaven, and I like it just as well, for since the last fortnight in September, which was very rainy, the beach is dismal—­so different from what it was in the summer.  The town looks gloomy under a cloudy sky with its blackened old brick houses!  We are better off at Lizerolles, whose autumnal beauties you know so well that I will say nothing about them.—­Oh, Fred, how often I regret that I am not a boy!  I could take your gun and go shooting in the swamps, where there are clouds of ducks now.  I feel sure that if you were in my place, you could kill time without killing game; but I am at the end of my small resources when I have played a little on the piano to amuse your mother and have read her the ‘Gazette de France’.  In the evening we read a translation of some English novel.  There are neighbors, of course, old fogies who stay all the year round in Picardy—­but, tell me, don’t you find them sometimes a little too respectable?  My greatest comfort is in your dog, who loves me as much as if I were his master, though I can not take him out shooting.  While I write he is lying on the hem of my gown and makes a little noise, as much as to tell me that I recall you to his remembrance.  Yet you are not to suppose that I am suffering from ennui, or am ungrateful, nor above all must you imagine that I have ceased to love your excellent mother with all my heart.  I love her, on the contrary, more than ever since I passed this winter through a great, great sorrow—­a sorrow which is now only a sad remembrance, but which has changed for me the face of everything in this world.  Yes, since I have suffered myself, I understand your mother.  I admire her, I love her more than ever.

“How happy you are, my dear Fred, to have such a sweet mother,—­ a real mother who never thinks about her face, or her figure, or her age, but only of the success of her son; a dear little mother in a plain black gown, and with pretty gray hair, who has the manners and the toilette that just suit her, who somehow always seems to say:  ‘I care for nothing but that which affects my son.’  Such mothers are rare, believe me.  Those that I know, the mothers of my friends, are for the most part trying to appear as young as their daughters—­nay, prettier, and of course more elegant.  When they have sons they make them wear jackets a l’anglaise and turn-down collars, up to the age when I wore short skirts.  Have you noticed that nowadays in Paris there are only ladies who are young, or who