MY DEAREST THERESA, Your letter, which I received three weeks ago, was most welcome, though it was “the mingled yarn, of which we spin our lives.” Your happy bit of life with your brother, and your prospering children, and your journey, which always (so as you stop short of India) gives a fresh fit of spirits, and then your return, and that melancholy catastrophe.[465] I cannot say how grieved I was for that. Such a happy young life, and one that was of importance to so many others! I hope Lord John will be allowed to keep those children,[466] and I suppose she will have left them under his guardianship. I suppose he would hardly object to all the children being together. I see by the papers that you have been at Cassiobury with poor Lord John. Everybody writes what you say of Sir G. Villiers[467]--that he is not the least altered, which I own surprises me, because as far as I am concerned he has been decidedly “changed at nurse,” and just simply because he would not answer the two long letters I wrote him, I settled that he was not the original G. Villiers, with whom one could talk and laugh any number of hours, and whose visits were a bright spot in the day, but that he was a mixture of a Spanish Grandee in a reserved black cloak, with a mysterious hat and plume, etc., or a Diplomat in a French comedy who speaks blank verse. But “it is the greatest of comforts,” as Mrs. Bennett said about long sleeves, to know that he is unaltered. I should be sorry if those horrid Spaniards had gone and spoilt one of our pleasantest men, and I still think that a system of sending out bores to foreign courts would be an improvement. Foreigners would never know how it was. A bore would be softened by being translated into another language, or he might simply pass as an original--_un Anglais enfin_; and then we might keep all the amusing people to ourselves. I should like to have seen your brother; and how I should like to see your children! I have no doubt they are as pretty as you say; the little boy[468] always had a turn that way. I cannot make out whether there are any more coming, but I suppose you would have mentioned it if there were, and I think you are apt to increase your family in a dawdling way, not in that rapid manner with which my sister used to produce ten or twelve children all of a sudden, and before one was prepared for the shock. We came back to these dear good hills about a fortnight ago, and I love them more dearly than ever. The thermometer was at 91 in our tents, and after two days’ toiling up the hills, we found snow in our garden here. That is all gone, and the flowers are beginning to spring up. The snowy range is so clean and bright, it looks as if one might walk to it, and the red rhododendrons are looking like gigantic scarlet geraniums in the foreground. I cannot sketch hills at all: they are too large here, and there is no beginning nor end to them--no waterfalls, or convents, or old buildings to finish them off.