write, there is likely to be an end of our communication: not, by the
way, that I am never to go to London again; but not just yet. Here I
live with tolerable content: perhaps with as much as most people arrive
at, and what if one were properly grateful one would perhaps call
perfect happiness. Here is a glorious sunshiny day: all the morning I
read about Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on a bench in the
garden, a nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun
manfully not far off. A funny mixture all this, Nero, and the delicacy
of spring, all very human however. Then at half-past one lunch on
Cambridge cream cheese: then a ride over hill and dale: then spudding up
some weeds from the grass: and then, coming in, I sit down to write to
you, my sister winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the
most delightful little girl in the world chattering incessantly. So runs
the world away. You think I live in Epicurean ease; but this happens to
be a jolly day: one isn't always well, or tolerably good, the weather is
not always clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant
atrocity. But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end
of it....

Give my love to Thackeray from your upper window across the street.

... I am living (did I tell you this before?) at a little cottage close
by the lawn gates, where I have my books, a barrel of beer, which I tap
myself (can you tap a barrel of beer?), and an old woman to do for me. I
have also just concocted two gallons of tar-water under the directions
of Bishop Berkeley: it is to be bottled off this very day after a
careful skimming, and then drunk by those who can and will. It is to be
tried first on my old woman; if she survives, I am to begin; and it will
then gradually spread into the parish, through England, Europe, etc.,
"as the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake."