“Dear Sydney,--I got down to Bath all right, and, thanks to your ‘Study of Sociology,’ endured a slow, and cold, and dull, and depressing journey with the thermometer down to zero, and spirits to correspond, with the country a monotonous white, and the sky a monotonous grey, and a companion who smoked the vilest tobacco you can conceive. The old place looks as beautiful as ever, and to my great satisfaction the hills round about are green. Snow, save in pictures, is an abomination. Milsom Street looked asleep, and Gay Street decidedly dreary, but the inhabitants were roused by my knock, and the old landlady nearly shook my hand off. My father has an attack of jaundice and is in a miserable state. He was asleep when I got here, and the good old landlady, thinking the front sitting-room would be free, had invited ‘company,’ i.e., two or three married daughters and their belongings; one of the children beats Magnay’s ‘Carina’ as to beauty--he ought to paint her. Happy thought, send him and pretty Mrs. Esperance down here on spec. He can paint the child for the next Academy, and meantime I could enjoy his company. Well, all these good folks being just set-to at roast beef, I naturally wouldn’t hear of disturbing them, and in the end was obliged to sit down too and eat at that hour of the day the hugest dinner you ever saw--anything but voracious appetites offended the hostess. Magnay’s future model, for all its angelic face, ‘ate to repletion,’ like the fair American in the story. Then I went into my father’s room, and shortly after he woke up and asked me to give him some Friedrichshall water, making no comment at all on my return, but just behaving as though I had been here all the autumn, so that I felt as if the whole affair were a dream. Except for this attack of jaundice, he has been much as usual, and when you next come down you will find us settled into our old groove. The quiet of it after London is extraordinary. But I believe it suits the book, which gets on pretty fast. This afternoon I went up Lansdowne and right on past the Grand Stand to Prospect Stile, which is at the edge of a high bit of tableland, and looks over a splendid stretch of country, with the Bristol Channel and the Welsh hills in the distance. While I was there the sun most considerately set in gorgeous array. You never saw anything like it. It was worth the journey from London to Bath, I can assure you. Tell Magnay, and may it lure him down; also name the model aforementioned.