ought to do, when I tell you that this very day I received your dear
letter and sixteen others; then my father brought into my room the
newspaper to hear the ten or twelve columns of news from India; then
I dined and breakfasted in one; then I got up, and by that time
there were three parties of people in the garden; eight others
arrived soon after. . . . I was forced to leave, being engaged to
call on Lady Madeline Palmer. She took me some six miles on foot in
Mr. Palmer's beautiful plantations, in search of that exquisite
wild-flower the bog-bean, do you know it? most beautiful of flowers,
either wild--or, as K. puts it,--"tame." After long search we found
the plant not yet in bloom.'

Dr. Mitford weeps over his daughters exhaustion, telling everybody
that she is killing herself by her walks and drives. He would like
her never to go beyond the garden and beyond reach of the columns of
his newspaper. She declares that it is only by getting out and
afield that she can bear the strain and the constant alternation of
enforced work and anxiety. Nature was, indeed, a second nature to
her. Charles Kingsley himself could scarcely write better of the
East wind. . . .

'We have had nine weeks of drought and east wind, scarcely a flower
to be seen, no verdure in the meadows, no leaves in the hedgerows;
if a poor violet or primrose did make its appearance it was
scentless. I have not once heard my aversion the cuckoo. . . and
in this place, so evidently the rendezvous of swallows, that it
takes its name from them, not a swallow has yet appeared. The only
time that I have heard the nightingale, I drove, the one mild day we
have had, to a wood where I used to find the woodsorrel in beds;
only two blossoms of that could be found, but a whole chorus of