
Accept my thanks for your "rejoinder" and the newspaper that reached me in the same
wrapper bearing your handwriting strongly in evidence on the outside. These
occasional packets with which you indulge me give me great pleasure. The hint that
you are there,
exercising the old vigorous unmistakable pen-craft, and throwing a thought across
the sea to this little house, always sends me out of doors feeling better affected
than usual towards the dingy humanity and depressing conditions associated with
London
Business life; and as I pass Gilchrist's "good gray" portrait
of you sitting in the sun, where it hangs in the passage to be passed 20 times a
day, you are vivified for the moment with an extra vitality. Is this nonsense? I
think not.


