My dear George,--I 've only five minutes to give you; for the horses are at the door, and we 're to start at once. I have a great budget for you when we meet; for we've been over the Tyrol and Styria, spent ten days at Venice, and "done" Verona and the rest of them,--John Murray in hand. We 're now bound for Milan, where I want you to meet us on our arrival, with an invitation from my mother, asking Josephine to the villa. I 've told her that the note is already there awaiting her, and for mercy' sake let there be no disappointment. This dispensation is a horrible tedious affair; but I hope we shall have it now within the present month. The interval _she_ desires to spend in perfect retirement, so that the villa is exactly the place, and the attention will be well timed. Of course they ought to receive her as well as possible. Mary Anne, I know, requires no hint; but try and persuade the governor to trim himself up a little, and if you could make away with that old flea-bitten robe be calls his dressing-gown, you 'd do the State some service. Look to the servants, too, and smarten them up; a cold perspiration breaks over me when I think of Betty Cobb! I rely on you to think of and provide for everything, and am ever your attached friend, James Dodd. I changed my last five-hundred-pound note at Venice, so that I must bring the campaign to a close immediately. LETTER XV. MRS. DODD TO MRS. MARY GALLAGHER, DODSBOROUGH Parma, the "Cour de Parme." My dear Molly,--When I wrote to you last, we were living, quietly, it is true, and unostensively, but happily, on the Lake of Comus, and there we might have passed the whole autumn, had not K. L, with his usual thoughtfulness for the comfort of his family, got into a row with the police, and had us sent out of the country. No less, my dear! Over the frontier in twenty-four hours was the word; and when Lord George wanted to see some of the great people about it, or even make a stir in the newspapers, he wouldn't let him. "No," said he, "the world is getting tired of Englishmen that are wronged by foreign governments. They say, naturally enough, that there must be some fault in ourselves, if we are always in trouble, this way; and, besides, I would not take fifty pounds, and have somebody get up in the House and move for all the correspondence in the case of Mr. Dodd, so infamously used by the authorities in Lombardy." Them 's his words, Molly; and when we told him that it was a fine way of getting known and talked about in the world, what was his answer do you think? "I don't want notoriety; and if I did, I 'd write a letter to the 'Times,' and say it was I that defended Hougoumont, in the battle of Waterloo. There seems to be a great dispute about it, and I don't see why I could n't put in my claim." I suppose after that, Molly, there will be very little doubt that his head isn't quite right, for he was no more at Waterloo than you or me.