her from his own very moderate store--a fellow singer who met and loved her in the days when she was free, and in these, her days of ignominy, loves her honorably and hopelessly still, and devotes himself to any service in her and her children's behalf that she will permit; a poor, little, unknown, unsung Bayard, whose earthly happiness may be added to those sadder wrecks of lives ruined by the theorizings of Lady ---- and her co-vagrants." What do you think of all this, Susie? Would you exchange love in the bush for love among these "leaders of thought" in London? How, after these wicked, cynic, dreary histories and encounters, I nestle into my home and am so humbly grateful for its every little self-abnegation, every straitness of bond, no less than for the unspeakable riches it holds--that of being loved and beloving to one's heart's highest-heaped and deepest-down-pressed measure. Love from Ronayne and self to my dearest woman. All kindest regards to the head of the house, and tender wishes that the new home in that topsy-turvy region of the world may be as happy and, some day, as noisy as that whence this journeys to you from Lil. 18 STANFIELD GARDENS, } March 12, 1876. } And do I never, in these days, see anything of my cooperative friends? Yes, something, but less since Miss Hedges went to Duesseldorf. Mrs. Stainton came to us a good deal early in the winter, but a month ago she was ordered off to Bournemouth for an obstinate cough, and the long letters I get from her are fuller of personal and spiritual matters than of references to her late co-associates. For she's done at last what we had all been looking for--gone over to Rome--and one hears from her now nothing but the Church: the Church's wisdom and peace, allusions to the saints, speculations upon states of prayer, enthusiasm for the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and fervent wishes that all puzzled wayfarers may find what she has found--absolute conviction and rest--though she owns that the new religion is fuller, far, of struggles and crosses than the old. "What does our father, the Dean, say?" I asked lately. "That this 'is at least a respectable vagary,'" she wrote back, "'which one could hardly say for most of my dreams and experiments!' Fancy papa's feeling himself authorized to speak of the spiritual life of anything above a crayfish!--a dear old country gentleman who is too entirely well satisfied with this world and his lot in it ever to think of heaven except in an official way, and whose strongest vocations are matrimony, and the writing mildly learned antiquarian papers for the West of England Archaeological Society.