Maria [Copley][189] has just been telling a story of a Christening that makes me laugh. She and her sister stood Godmothers to two little twins in the village, and carried them to church. The children were only a fortnight old, and therefore were much wrapped up, and Miss Copley, who is not used to handling children, carried hers with the feet considerably higher than the head. She gave it carefully to the clergyman when he was to christen it, and together they undid its cloak in search of its face, and found two little red feet. They were so surprised at this that the clergyman looked up in her face and said: “Why, then, where is its head?” And she, being just as much frightened, answered: “I really cannot think.” Maria at last suggested that in all probability the head would be at the opposite end of the bundle from the feet, and so it proved. Good-bye, dear Eleanor,[190] mind you get better. It is foolish to be ill; I found it so myself. Love to all. Your affectionate Aunt, E. E. _Miss Eden to Miss Villiers._ [EYAM RECTORY], STONEY MIDDLETON, _August 1824_. MY DEAR MISS VILLIERS, George has gone to Scotland to kill the poor dumb grouse (or _grice_), as they ought to be in the plural, but I will transmit your direction to him, and if he can do what you wish I daresay he will, though I have an idea it is the sort of thing about which people chuse to look really important, and say they cannot interfere. ...Dear Lady Chichester![191] How lucky it is that people’s letters are so like themselves. It is perhaps not unnatural but amusing too, I did not know till Lady Buckinghamshire mentioned it the other day when she was talking of this marriage that the Chichesters have the strongest possible feeling on the subject of connexion, and she said they would look on this marriage as a positive calamity. How very absurd it is, and it is a shame of Lady Chichester to exaggerate George Osborne’s[192] faults so much. He was not in fact very much to blame, in his disagreement with Lord Francis, and if it were not the way of the Osborne family to make their family politics the subject of their jokes to all the world, George would have been reckoned just as good as any boy of his age. I imagine that even Lord Chichester has found _his_ son liked his own way as well as the rest of the world, but perhaps Lady Chichester and he do not impart to each other the little difficulties they find with those separate little families you mention....