DEAREST THERESA, I am kind to write to-night, for Fanny and I poked out an old backgammon board of the General’s[413] and began to play, and I beat her two single games and a gammon, so that in coming to my letter I am probably leaving “fortune at the flood, and all my after life will be bound in flats and shallows.” All your fault. Our cottage is a real little cottage, belonging to an old General Eden who, on the score of relationship, let us have it for almost nothing. It is very clean and old bachelorish, and he lets with it an old housemaid who scolds for half-an-hour if a grain of seed drops from the bird’s cage, or if Chance[414] whisks a hair out of his tail; we are grown so tidy and as she is otherwise an obliging old body, she has been an advantage to us. We took the house only by the week, and as my health has entirely recovered the complete break-up it came to, from our long detention in London, and as his Lordship is living alone at that Admiralty, we depart on Wednesday to settle ourselves there till the Government changes, or I am ill again. However, I do not mind London so much in cold weather. I have been very busy this last week _setting up_ house, as the Ministers will be most of them in town next month without their families, and George has announced an intention to make the Admiralty pleasant to his colleagues. I have but one idea of the manner in which that is to be achieved, and hope the cook may turn out as well as Mr. Orby Hunter’s recommendation promises. Oh dear! I dread the sight of their dear old faces again, and of that “full of business” manner which they get into when they meet in any number. I wish I could write like Mrs. Hannah More, and have money enough to build myself a Barley Wood,[415] and resolution to go and live there. I am so taken by that book and amazingly encouraged by it, for she was as dissipated and as wicked as any of us for the first half of our life, so there is no saying whether we may not turn out good for something at last.