Dear Bill,--At last I find myself with an hour or so to spare, so here goes! How are you all? Well, I hope. I received your little present on the anniversary. Many thanks, old girl. How on earth do you remember the date of everybody's birthday? Honestly, I should have let it pass without noticing if that wee book had not arrived two days before. So you see, you _are_ of some use in the world after all! (This is a joke.) How's Mac getting on with the etching? Tell him I've taken to using only forty per cent. nitric acid in distilled water. This gives very good results for all ordinary work, much more certain than the nitrous, and doesn't make such a stink. There's no demand just now for modern work, in England at any rate. I can hardly believe what you say about the shows in New York. London's dead for etchers. Every dealer is clamorous for copies of the old masters. The rotten thing is that it pays better than doing original work, you know. I have a job on now--twenty plates at L50 a plate, simply copying Girtins and Bartolozzis. I shall do four plates a year. I take things pretty easily, work in the morning, potter round the garden in the afternoon, tennis and cycling when the weather permits. This has been a terrible summer. English weather gets worse, I believe. We had rain for a solid week in July. I was out on a tramp through the midlands and got caught in it, which reminds me of a most remarkable chap I met at the time. I really must tell you about him, because I don't remember anyone who has so impressed his _personality_ upon me as this man did. "It was this way. I had been sketching round about Market Overton, and getting rather sick of the incessant rain, so I packed up my knapsack and started home. It really is much more jolly walking in the rain than sitting in a stuffy inn parlour waiting for it to stop. Well, at Peterboro' I heard the country eastward was flooded and farmers ruined. Of course, my road lay through March and Ely to Newmarket and Colchester, and I wouldn't believe the boys who called to me that I'd be stopped; but sure enough, not two miles east of Peterboro' the road slid under water and people were punting themselves about on doors, and cooking their grub upstairs. In the fields the hay-cocks and corn-ricks were just showing themselves above the water. It made one's heart ache for the farmers. Well, I turned back, of course, and took the London road to Huntingdon, which runs high all the way to Alconbury. I was getting jolly tired and wondering if I should find a decent bed before I reached Huntingdon, when I came to Saxon Cross. At the cross-roads stands a fine inn all by itself, and to judge by the names and addresses in the visitors' book, it is nearly as well known in America as in England. The Saxon Cross Hotel is not really a hotel at all, being a hunting inn. But it is very comfortable, with brushes hung all round the walls and fine old engravings of sporting scenes in all the rooms.