He writes to my father, 16 September 1861:--“I have attended the sick rooms of the poor in this neighbourhood on all occasions, typhus or anything else, and I often say the alwise Governor of the Universe has protected me, and allowed me to arrive at the age allotted for man; and I find generally speaking, when people attend the sick from pure philanthropic motives, they are preserved from infection.” But he did not concur in similar reasoning by the Rector’s wife. He writes, 30 December 1860:--“Mrs ***** says Never anyone yet took cold in a church, and I cannot agree with her, for I believe many more colds are taken at church than elsewhere.” My grandfather often enjoins my father not to let his letters be seen, as he writes offhand without consideration. And this is very evident in many of them. He will begin with some assertion, then qualify it with ‘not but what’ etc., ‘though no doubt’ etc., and so on, till at last he talks himself quite round, and ends by saying just the opposite of what he said at first. His sister-in-law, my great-aunt Anne Smale, had her last illness here; and he writes to my father, 8 January 1865:--“It has been a dreary week having a corpse in the house. It is seventy years ago that my grandmother died [really sixty-six years] and there has not been a death in the house since. Well, she was buried in a vault in the chancel of Manaton church.” And this leads him on to speak of other members of the family lying in that vault, and thus to reminiscences of some of them, ending quite jocosely. He used to keep a record of the weather here; and in this he sometimes noted things quite unconnected with the weather, such as, “Mr ***** called: had no wish to see him.” But generally there was some connexion. Thus, on 25 January 1847, he notes “St Paul’s day, sun shining, and according to prediction we shall have a plentiful year: may God grant it.” On 1 September 1847, “Woodpecker called aloud for wet: wish he may be true, the turnips want it.” On 12 May 1857, “Soft mild rain: what the old people call butter-and-barley weather.” On St Swithin’s day, 15 July 1867, “Heavy rain: so 40 days of it.” There are also many notes about the singing of the birds--26 January 1847, “the home-screech singing merrily this morning”--1 May 1850, “the nut-hatch a cheerful singer”--22 April 1864, “how delightful and cheering is that old grey-bird”--and so on. I may note that the home-screech is the mistle-thrush, and the grey-bird is the song-thrush, sometimes known here as the grey thrush, just as the black-bird is known as the black thrush. In these parts the field-fare is the blue-bird.