“I am sorry to hear you have not been well, but I trust it is a thing of the past already: I don’t think either of us would be what is called a good patient. I like the Homer Odyssey (?) greatly. I suspect I guess the writer--that is, from a mere accident. ‘Suez’ is excellent, and Stanley’s opinion is that of the best German engineers also. Aren’t you flattering to my Lord of Knebworth? It was not, however, a ‘good fairy’ gave him a wife. “Sydney sends her love. She is going over to England in spring (at least she says so, and I suppose I am bound to believe it) to pay that Devonshire visit I interrupted last year.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Feb_. 3,1870. “In Stanley’s clever article on ‘Suez’ for January there is a sketch of an Italian travelling companion so like a portrait that we all here fancy we recognise the man. It is the same who addresses the Empress Eugénie so brusquely. If we be right, he is an old acquaintance of ours called ‘Campereo.’ Pray, if occasion serve, ask if this be the man. It is wonderfully like him at all events, and I could almost bet on it. “I have been hoping to hear from you, and delaying to tell you--what for me is a rare event--a piece of pleasant news. Sydney is about to be married. The _sposo_, an Englishman, young, well educated, well-mannered, and well off; he is the great millowner, paper manufacturer, and shipbuilder of Austria, and has about £7000 a-year. “I need not say it is a great match for a poor ‘tocherless lass,’ but I can say that the man’s character and reputation would make him acceptable if he had only £500 a-year. “To myself, overborne and distressed by the thought of how little I had done for my children, and how wastefully and foolishly I had lived,--spending my means pretty much as I did my brains, in bursts of spendthrift extravagance, and leaving myself in both cases with nothing to fall back on,--it is a relief unspeakable that one of my poor girls at least is beyond the straits of penury. “I know that you and Mrs Blackwood have a warm and kindly feeling towards us, and you will be glad to hear of such good fortune. I do not know that the excitement has been very favourable to my poor wife, who can only look as yet to the one feature--that is, that she loses a child’s companionship; but I trust that in time she will see with me that the event is one to be truly thankful for. “The marriage is to take place on the 21st, and after a trip to Rome, &c, they visit Paris, and on to London some time in April. Sydney ardently hopes that you and Mrs Blackwood may be in town this season: she longs to see you both again.