good one has gained there gets shaken off one in the terrific journey home again, and then the different atmosphere is so trying to one fresh from the pure air of Fife-so exhausting and depressing. If it hadn't been that I had a deal of housemaiding to execute during the week I was here before Mr. C. returned, I must have given occasion for newspaper paragraphs under the head of Melancholy Suicide.' But dusting books, making chair-covers, and all that sort of thing,' leads one on insensibly to live-till the crisis gets safely passed.

My dear! I haven't time nor inclination for much letter-writing-nor have you, I should suppose, but do let us exchange letters now and then. A friendship which has lived on air for so many years together is worth the trouble of giving it a little human sustenance.

Give my kind regards to your husband-I like him. And believe me,

Your ever affectionate

JANE WELSH CARLYLE.

LETTER 214.

In October, after getting home, there was a determined onslaught made on 'Frederick,' an attempt (still in the way of youth-16 rather than 60!) to vanquish by sheer force. the immense masses of incondite or semi-condite rubbish which had accumulated on Frederick,' that is, to let the printer straightway drive me through it!-a most fond and foolish notion, which indeed I myself partly knew, durst I

have confessed it, to be foolish and even impossible! But this was the case all along; I never once said to myself, All those chaotic mountains, wide as the world, high as the stars, dismal as Lethe, Styx, and Phlegethon, did mortal ever see the like of it for size and for quality in the rubbish way? All this thou wilt have to take into thee, to roast and smelt in the furnace of thy own poor soul till thou fairly do smelt the grains of gold out of it!' No, though dimly knowing all this, I durst not openly know it (indeed, how could I otherwise ever have undertaken such a subject?); and I had got far on with the unutterable enterprise, before I did clearly admit that such was verily proving, and would, on to the finis, prove to have been the terrible part of this affair, affair which I must now conquer tale quale, or else perish! This first attempt of October-February, 18591860 (after dreadful tugging at the straps), was given up by her serious advices, which I could not but admit to be true as well as painful and humiliating! November 1860 had arrived before there was any further printing: nothing thenceforth but silent pulling at a dead lift, which lasted four or five years more.

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My darling must have suffered much in all this; how much! I sometimes thought how cruel it was on her, to whom Frederick' was literally nothing except through me, so cruel, alas, alas, and yet inevitable! Never once in her deepest misery did she hint, by word or sign, what she too was suffering under that score; me only did she ever seem to pity in it, the heroic, the thrice noble, and wholly loving soul!

She seemed generally a little stronger this year, and only a little; her strength, though blind I never saw it, and kept hoping, hoping, was never to come back, but the reverse, the reverse more and more! Except a week or two at the Grange (January 1860), which did not hurt either of

us, I think we had intended to make no visits this year, or as good as none. We did, however, and for good reasons, make two-hers, a most unlucky or provoking one, provokingly curtailed and frustrated, as will be seen. This was in August, to Alderley, and she could have gone further but for blind ill luck. Beginning of July she had tried a week or thereby of lodging at Brighton, and invited me, who tried for three days but could get no sleep for noises, and had to hurry home by myself; where also I could not sleep nor stay to any purpose, and was chiefly by brother John, who accompanied, led by sea to Thurso, for a long sail' first of all.

To Mrs. Russell, Thornhill.

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea: Friday, Jan. 28, 1860. Dearest Mary,-A letter from me would have crossed yours (with the book) on the road, if it hadn't been for a jacket! Things are so oddly hooked together in this world. The connection in this case is simple enough. I needed a little jacket for home. wear, and, possessing a superfluous black silk scarf, I resolved, in a moment of economical enthusiasm, to make with my own hands a jacket out of it. For, in spite of the thirty thousand distressed needlewomen' one hears so much of, the fact remains that nobody can get a decent article of dress made here, unless at enormous cost. And besides, the dressmakers who can fit one won't condescend to make anything but with their own materials. So I fell to cutting out that jacket last Monday, and only finished it to-day (Friday)! and was so much excited over the unusual

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nature of the enterprise (for I detest sewing, and don't sew for weeks together) that I could not leave off, for anything that could be postponed, till the jacket was out of hands. But Lord preserve me, what a bother; better to have bought one ready-made at the dearest rate. I won't take a needle in my hands, except to sew on Mr. C.'s buttons, for the next six months. By the way, would you like the shape of my jacket, which is of the newest? I have it on paper, and could send it to you quite handy.

Oh my dear, I am very much afraid, the reading of that book will be an even more uncongenial job of work for me than the jacket, and won't have as much to show for itself when done. If there be one thing I dislike more than theology it is geology. And here we have both, beaten up in the same mortar, and incapable, by any amount of beating, to coalesce. What could induce any live woman to fall a-writing that sort of book? And a decidedly clever womanI can see that much from the little I have already read of it here and there. She expresses her meaning very clearly and elegantly too. If it were only on any subject I could get up an interest in, I should read her writing with pleasure. But even when Darwin, in a book that all the scientific world is in ecstasy over, proved the other day that we are all come from shell fish, it didn't move me to the slightest curiosity whether we are or not. I did not feel that the

slightest light would be thrown on my practical life for me, by having it ever so logically made out that my first ancestor, millions of millions of ages back, had been, or even had not been, an oyster. It remained a plain fact that I was no oyster, nor had any grandfather an oyster within my knowledge; and for the rest, there was nothing to be gained, for this world, or the next, by going into the oyster-question, till all more pressing questions were exhausted! Soif I can't read Darwin, it may be feared I shall break down in Mrs. Duncan. Thanks to you, however, for the book, which will be welcome to several of my acquaintances. There is quite a mania for geology at present, in the female mind. My next-door neighbour would prefer a book like Mrs. Duncan's to Homer's 'Iliad' or Milton's Paradise Lost.' There is no

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accounting for tastes.'

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I have done my visit to the Grange, and got no hurt by it; and it was quite pleasant while it lasted. The weather was mild, and besides, the house is so completely warmed, with warm-water pipes, that it is like summer there in the coldest weather. The house was choke-full of visitors-four-and-twenty of us, most of the time. And the toilettes! Nothing could exceed their magnificence; for there were four young new-married ladies, among the rest, all vieing with each other who to be finest. The blaze of diamonds 1 Finished January 13.

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