c. In 1871, in one of my walks at Abingdon, (see Fors, Letters IV. and VI.,) I saw some ragged children playing by the roadside on the bank of a ditch, and gathering what buttercups they could find. Watching them a little while, I at last asked what they were doing. ‘This is my garden,’ answered a little girl about nine years old. ‘Well, but gardens ought to be of use; this is only full of buttercups. Why don’t you plant some strawberries in it?’ ‘I have none to plant.’ ‘If you had a little garden of your own, and some to plant, would you take care of them?’ ‘That I would.’ Thereupon I told her to come and ask for me at the Crown and Thistle, and with my good landlady Mrs. Wonnacott’s help, rented a tiny piece of ground for her. Her father and mother have since died; and her brothers and sisters (four, in all,) are in the Union, at Abingdon. I did not like to let this child go there too; so I’ve sent her to learn shepherding at a kindly shepherd’s; close to Arundel, on the farm of the friend whose son (with perhaps a little help from his sister) took me out foxhunting; and examined the snail-shells for me. This ten pounds is for her board, etc., till she can be made useful. d. I had settled my servant Crawley, with his wife and his three children, in a good house here at my gate. He spent his savings in furnishing it, in a much more costly manner than I thought quite proper; but that, (as I then supposed,) was his affair, more than mine. His wife died last year: and now both he and I think he will be more useful to me at Oxford than Coniston. So I send him to Oxford,—but have to pay him for his house-furniture, which is very provoking and tiresome, and the kind of expense one does not calculate on. The curious troublesomeness of Fors to me in all business matters has always been one of the most grotesque conditions of my life. The names of Warren and Jones appear for the last time in my accounts, for I have had to give up my tea-shop, owing to the (too surely mortal) illness of my active old servant, Harriet Tovey,—a great grief to me, no less than an utter stop to my plans in London. III. I somewhat regret, for my friend’s sake, that he desires me to print the subjoined letter in its entirety, if at all. I must print his answer to my question about Usury, for which I am heartily grateful to him, for reference in next Fors; and can only therefore do as he bids me with the rest, which he has written more hastily than is his habit. What answer it seems to me to need will be found in the attached notes.