“I have no patience with you for being ill. What I a fellow of something and twenty, with a sound chest, six feet in his stockings, and a hunter in top condition; what an ungrateful dog to Fortune you are! Leave sickness to old cripples like myself,--hipped, dunned, and blue-devilled,--with a bad balance at the bank, and a ruined digestion. _You_ have no business with malady! Come over and see me here: the very contrast will make you happy and contented. “I hope, however, you are all right by this time. I’m sure you stick too close to the desk. Be warned by _me!_ It was all over-application and excessive industry ruined _my_ constitution; and instead of being threatened to be cut off, as I am now, in the flower of my youth, I might have lived on to a ripe old age, and all that rottenness that they tell us makes ‘medlars’ exquisite. “I send you a tailpiece to the O’D. Heaven grant that the Saxon intelligence, for which I daily feel less veneration, should not suspect me of being a Fenian in disguise, though if it should get me dismissed from my consulate and turned out into the streets, I’d almost cry hurrah! for, after all, picking oakum could scarcely be worse than cudgelling my brains for what, after all the manipulation, can’t be got out of them.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _April_ 1,1870. “I suppose ‘Sanding the Sugar’ reached you too late, or was it that you don’t like it? _I_ thought it was good, but needed careful going over again and perhaps enlarging. “I send you three now, and hope you will like them. I have been days over them, and without getting on, for my poor wife’s time of being operated on again draws nigh, and her fear and nervousness have made her seriously ill. For the last three nights I have been sitting up beside her, and as I have been very ‘creaky’ some time back, this pressure has pushed me very hard indeed. “Many thanks for ‘Piccadilly’; it is beautifully got up, and the style and look of it perfectly faultless. I have re-read it, and like it greatly,--indeed, I think more than the first time. In the little touches of that brusqueness which the well-bred world affects, Oliphant is admirable, and so removed from that low-world dialogue that vulgar novelists imagine people in Society converse in. I am, however, not surprised at the strange step he has taken in life; such extreme fastidiousness could find no rest anywhere but in savagery, just as we see incredulity take refuge in the Church of Rome: _les extrêmes se touchent_ oftener in life than we suspect.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _April_ 5, 1870. “I send you an ‘O’Dowd’ I hope will please you. I think it has more ‘fun’ in it than all my late ones,--though, God knows, I never myself felt less disposed to drollery, for I am literally worn out with watching beside my poor sick wife. I cannot bear to read, and it is a blessing to me to run to the pen for distraction.