I conclude you are now sitting with your own goldfish under your fig-tree, you who live under the shadow of your own old Men.[392] By the bye, with your blue pensioners, I am sure you will feel for us in the dispersion of our red pensioners. There was a great cry heard in the Hospital, Kilmainham weeping for her old men, because they are no longer to be! However, they are respited, for my enemy Ellice[393] put his pen through their existence, and Mr. Littleton[394] too, and ordered even the fashion of their dispersion, but forgot to enquire particulars, and they have stumbled upon an Act of Parliament, and so must wait till another Act breaks through it. Ellice dropped his pen, and was obliged to pick it up again. Your affectionate PAMELA CAMPBELL. _Miss Eden to Mrs. Lister._ GREENWICH PARK, _Sunday, December 15, 1833_. DEAREST THERESA, I have just had a letter from your brother George,[395] and though probably you heard from him by the same opportunity, yet it is always a pleasure to know that one’s brothers are heard of by others as well as oneself. It makes assurance doubly sure, which that clever creature Shakespeare knew was not once more than enough, in this unsure world. Mr. V. seems very happy and very well, and will probably be more personally comfortable when he is the owner of a few tables and chairs. It was such a relief _off_ my mind (as a friend of mine says when anything is a relief _to_ her mind) to find that he had received an enormous letter I wrote to him some time ago, a thing like the double sheet of the _Times_ in private life, and which had been so long unacknowledged, that I felt sure that it had been captured, and that I should see a horrible garbled translation of it copied from a Carlist paper, and headed “Intercepted Correspondence,” whereupon I must simply have changed my religion, gone into a convent, and taken the veil. The _propriety_ of my letters surpasses all belief, so I should not have been ashamed in that sense; but when I write to your brother, or to Lord Minto, or to that class of correspondents, I always rake together every possible anecdote and fact--or what is called a fact--and write them all down just like a string of paragraphs in a newspaper. I always suppose nonsense would bore them, so the horrid letters are made up of proper names, and if there is an unsafe thing in the world to meddle with it is a proper name, and that is the bother of a letter that goes abroad, particularly to such a country as Spain. I saw George was just as fussy about a letter he had written to your brother; but now we know our little manuscripts have found their way safely, we mean to write again--at least I do, the first time I find anything to say. At present I am out of that article.