“DEAR COLMAN,—It may be some five-and-thirty years since we met, and I believe as near forty years as may be since I was promoted from my garret, No. 3 Peckwater, into your _ci-devant_ rooms in the old Quad, on which occasion I bought your things. Of all your household furniture I possess but one article, which I removed with myself to my first house and castle in Essex, as a very befitting parsonage sideboard, viz., a mahogany table, with two side drawers, and which still ‘does the state some service,’ though not of plate. But I have an article of yours on a smaller scale, a certain little flat mahogany box, furnished partially, I should say, with cakes of paint, which probably you over-looked, or undervalued as a _vade-mecum_, and left. And, as an exemplification of the great vanity of over-anxious care, and the safe preservation _per contra_, in which an article may possibly be found without any care at all, that paint-box is still _in statu quo_, at this present writing, having run the gauntlet, not merely of my bachelor days, but of the practical cruelties of my thirteen children, all alive and merry, thank God! albeit as unused and as little disposed to preserve their own playthings or chattels from damage as children usually are, yet it survives! ‘The reason why I cannot tell,’ unless I kept it ‘for the dangers it had passed.’ “Though I have been well acquainted with you publicly nearly ever since our Christ Church days, our habits, pursuits, and callings, having cast us into different countries and tracts, we have not, I think met since the date I speak of. I have a house at Chiswick, where I rather think this nine-lived box is, and, whether it is or no, I shall be very glad if you will give me a call to dine, and take a bed, if convenient to you; and if I cannot introduce you to your old acquaintance and recollections, I shall have great pleasure in substituting new ones,—Mrs. Lowth and eleven of our baker’s dozen of olive-branches, our present complement in the house department, my eldest boy being in the West Indies, and my third having returned to the military college last Saturday, his vacation furlough having expired. As the summer begins to borrow now and then an autumn evening, the sooner you will favour me with your company the surer you will be of finding me at Grove House, the expiration of other holidays being the usual signal for weighing anchor and shifting our moorings to parsonage point. I remember you, or David Curson, had among your phrases, _quondam_, one of anything being ‘d---d summerly;’ I trust, however, having since tasted the delights of the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, that you have worn out that prejudice, and will catch the season before it flies us, or give me a line,