“... I do not know whether I am more stupid than other people, but I neither find any of the vexation some find in building, nor the great amusement others tell me they experience in it. Indeed, if it were not that a house must be building before it can be built, I should never have been a builder.... I have not had a quarter of an hour’s pain or pleasure from the operation. I have not met with the least disappointment or mortification. It has gone on as fast and well as I expected, and, when it is habitable, I shall take great pleasure in it; for it is an excellent house, finely situated, and just such as I have always wish’d, but never hoped, to have. “... I know that in some little alterations we made at Sandleford, the country workmen were so tedious, we were obliged to send for carpenters from London; but here we have such a plenty of Hands, that everything goes continually on. [Illustration: The Minuet _Photogravure from the painting by E. L. Garrido_] “... I was grieved to see Scott’s Hall advertised to be sold. It is a pity such an ancient family should be rooted up to plant some upstart nabob in its place. “... I suppose your consort was concerned at the indiscretion of his Pallas, Mrs. Macaulay. Had she married a great-great-grandson of one of the regicides, however youthful he had been, it might have been pardonable; but the second mate of a surgeon to an Indian man-of-war, of twenty-two, seems no way accountable. If ye Minerva she carried on the outside of her coach had been consulted, no doubt but the sage goddess, even in effigy, would have given signs of disapprobation. I have sent you some verses of Mr. Anstey’s on the subject. The first copy he put into the urn, at Mrs. Millar’s, at Batheaston; and being desired, when he drew them, to read them a second time, instead of so doing, he read the other copy.”