"Poor Anne wrote to _you_, I know, after the death of her infant--her little Highlandman, as she proudly called him in her last letter before she lost him. Gilchrist talked last year of bringing her and his boy south this summer, and I had some hopes of seeing them all here: but I have not been able to get them to speak again of travelling, and I give it up for this year. I hope your letters and theirs fall due seasonably; that your reports of all your devices to cool yourself, reach them in the depth of their Caithness winter; and that all they say to you of their snow-drifts and freshets is acceptable when you are panting in the hottest of your noons. Anne writes more cheerfully than she did, and Gilchrist says she is exerting herself to overcome her sorrow. Their love must be passing strange in the eyes of all such as despised Anne's match. It is such as should make Anne's brothers feel very cordially towards Gilchrist. We have drifted asunder in life rather strangely, when one comes to think of it; and our anchorage grounds are pretty far apart. Who would have thought it, when we four used to climb the old apple-tree together, and drop down from the garden wall? I wonder whether we shall ever contrive to meet in one house once more, and whether I may be honoured by my house being the place? It is possible; and I spend certain of my dreams upon the project. Do you not find that one effect of this wide separation is, to make one fancy the world smaller than one used to think it? You, on the other side of it, probably waked up to this conviction long ago. It is just opening upon me, shut up in my nook of our little island. When I have a letter from you, like that which lies before me, spiced with an old family joke or two, and a good many new ones of your own, all exactly like yourself, I am persuaded you cannot be very far off; and I should certainly call you from my window to come in to tea, but from a disagreeable suspicion that I should get no answer. But do tell me in your next whether our globe has not been made far too much of its children, and whether its oceans do not look very like ponds, when you cast your eye over them to that small old apple-tree I mentioned just now.