Now that I have said a good word for Lincolnshire and a bad one for Essex, I hope I have wrought upon your feelings, and that you will come and see us with Mr. Rawnsley. Pray do. You could come at the same time with Miss Walls when she pays her visit to the Arabins, and so have all the inside of the mail to yourselves; for though you were very heroic last summer on the high places of the diligence, I presume that this weather is sufficient to cool any courage down to zero.--Believe me, with love from all to all, always yours, A. TENNYSON. BEECH HILL, HIGH BEECH, LOUGHTON, ESSEX. To this letter Mrs. Tennyson, the Poet's mother, adds a postscript, though she complains that Alfred has scarcely left her room to do so. The letter is dated in her hand. The Halton family consisted of Edward, Drummond, and Sophy. The latter, with Rosa Baring, were two of Alfred's favourite partners at the Spilsby and Horncastle balls. Sophy Rawnsley became Mrs. Ed. Elmhirst; she often talked of the old Halton and Somersby days. "He was," she said, "so interesting, because he was so unlike other young men; and his unconventionality of manner and dress had a charm which made him more acceptable than the dapper young gentleman of the ordinary type at ball or supper party. He was a splendid dancer, for he loved music, and kept such time; but you know," she would say, "we liked to talk better than to dance together at Horncastle, or Spilsby, or Halton; he always had something worth saying, and said it so quaintly." Rosa at eighty-three recalled the same times with animation, and said to me, "You know we used to spoil him, for we sat at his feet and worshipped him; and he read to us, and how well he read! and when he wrote us those little poems we were more than proud. Ah, those days at Somersby and Harrington and Halton, how delightful they were!" The Halton family were a decade younger than Charles, Alfred, and Mary Tennyson, but Drummond married eight years before Alfred. Emily Sellwood, just before her marriage with Alfred, wrote to Mrs. Drummond Rawnsley: MY DEAREST KATIE--You and Drummond are among the best and kindest friends I have in the world, and let me not be ungrateful, I have some very good and very kind--Thy loving sister EMILY. The use of the _thy_ is very frequent with the Sellwoods, and in all Mary Tennyson's letters too. It was at Halton, in the time of its next Rector, Drummond Rawnsley, that the farmer Gilbey Robinson gave his son Canon H. D. Rawnsley the famous advice which the Poet has preserved in his Lincolnshire poem "The Churchwarden and the Curate": But creeäp along the hedge bottoms an thou'll be a Bishop yit.