So papa and I went down to Ramsgate for a month, and a very great deal of good it did us. The fresh air and sea-bathing soon cured my nervousness, and the change of scene and the variety and life of the place--so different from the quiet sleepiness of Canterbury--gradually softened the bitterness of my grief; while nearly every day I had letters from Percy--long, loving letters, very cheering and dear to me--painting our future life together, and making me feel very happy; so happy, that I sometimes blamed myself for feeling so, so soon after my dear mother's death. It was a tranquil, quiet life, and I rapidly recovered my health and strength again. I had no acquaintances down there, for Ramsgate is too near to Canterbury for the people from there to visit it. Besides, Canterbury is a great deal too genteel to patronize so exceedingly vulgar a place as Ramsgate. I had a chatting acquaintance with several of the boatmen, and papa was very fond of sitting of an evening at the end of the pier, on the great stone posts to which the steamers are fastened, and talking to the fishermen of the wrecks they had known on those terrible Goodwins, and of the vessels which had been lost in trying to make the entrance to the Harbour. I also struck up a great acquaintance with the old bathing-woman--not, certainly, from any use that she was to me, for I would never let her take me by the hands and plunge me under water as I saw some girls do, but I used to talk to her of an evening when her work was done, and she was hanging up the towels to dry. She was a very worthy old body, and not so frightfully ugly as she looked in her bathing-costume, with her draggled clothes and weather-beaten bonnet, but was a quiet respectable-looking old woman. She had been a bathing-woman there for years and years; and had, I have no doubt, saved up a snug little sum of money. She told me that she had a married daughter who lived near London, and who had a very nice cottage down at Putney, and who let part of it to lodgers; and she hoped that if I were ever going near London, I would patronize her. I told her that there was not the remotest probability of such a thing; but she suggested that I might know some one who might one day go, and, accordingly, to please her, I took the address down in my pocket-book, but certainly without the remotest idea that it would ever turn out of the slightest use to me.