I think I have sent you a yearly letter of some sort or other for several years, so it has come upon me once again. I have nothing to ask of you except how you are. I should just like to know that, including 'yours' in you. Just a very few words will suffice, and I daresay you have no time for more. I have so much time that it is evident I have nothing to tell, except that I have just entered upon a military career in so far as having become much interested in the battle of Waterloo, which I just remember a year after it was fought, when a solemn anniversary took place in a neighbouring parish where I was born, and the village carpenter came to my father to borrow a pair of Wellington boots for the lower limbs of a stuffed effigy of Buonaparte, which was hung on a gibbet, and guns and pistols were discharged at him, while we and the parson of the parish sat in a tent where we had beef and plum pudding and loyal toasts. To this hour I remember the smell of the new-cut hay in the meadow as we went in our best summer clothes to the ceremony. But now I am trying to understand whether the Guards or the 52nd Regiment deserved most credit for _ecraseing_ the Imperial Guard. {286} Here is a fine subject to address you on in the year 1880! Let it go for nothing; but just tell me how you are, and believe me, with some feeling of old, if not very close intimacy, Yours sincerely, EDWARD FITZGERALD. _To R. C. Trench_. WOODBRIDGE. _May_ 18/80. MY DEAR LORD, I should have sent a line before now to thank you for your Calderon, had I not waited for some tidings of Donne from Mowbray, to whom I wrote some days ago. Not hearing from him, I suppose that he is out holyday-making somewhere; and therefore I will delay no longer.