Give me credit for coming from my balcony, from the sky, the stars, the moon, the heavenly air, to write to you. But it is not quite coming from them; my door is open, and I look now and then to the church tower, standing out so clear from the moonlight sky, which has scarcely yet lost its sunlight tinge--and my summer furniture of mignonette and sweet peas outside, to say nothing of the roses below or the trellis and the honeysuckle above--their united perfume all come streaming in the air. When I think of your imprisonment and your present deprivations of such a day as this, whose healing influences you so well would feel, I rejoice in your power of sympathy with the enjoyments as well as the sufferings of others, which makes me feel that I am refreshing rather than tantalizing you by placing my present position before you. The door of the house stands invitingly open, and the wide entrance hall into which the visitor is ushered is in itself suggestive of the welcome awaiting the coming guest. The rooms are spacious, and lead one into another in a social sort of way, and the windows, reaching down to the floor and opening on to the lawn, give a bright prospect of the beautiful world without, of the pleasure grounds and the green grass carpet, chequered as we look upon it with the woodland shade and a moving group of laughing, bright-eyed nymphs engaged in a garden game. Oftentimes from those windows, as well as in his walks and rides, did the good old rector pursue his favourite study. "Close before the window of our observation," he says in his "Familiar History of Birds," "a well-mown, short-grassed lawn is spread before him (the starling)--it is his dining-room; there in the spring he is allowed to revel, but seldom molested, on the plentiful supply of worms, which he collects pretty much in the same manner as the thrush, already described. Close at hand, within half-a-stone's throw, stands an ivy-mantled parish church, with its mossy grey tower, from the turreted pinnacle of which rises a flagstaff, crowned by its weathercock; under the eaves and within the hollows and chinks of the masonry of the tower are his nursery establishments. On the battlements and projecting grotesque tracery of its Gothic ornaments he retires to enjoy himself, looking down on the rural world below; while, at other times, a still more elevated party will crowd together on the letters of the weathercock, or, accustomed to its motion, sociably twitter away their chattering song, as the vane creaks slowly round with every change of wind."