MISS VARDON (India).—Do not be disappointed when we tell you that we think it is better to wait for a correspondent until the plague, of which you speak, has ceased raging. You have been inoculated, your house is free, and doubtless there is no danger whatever, but your correspondent or her elder friends might feel a little uneasy. Besides, we have received so many letters offering correspondence with the lady in question that we fear yours would be too late. SISSIE REDMOND.—1. Write about your farthing to the authorities of the British Museum or of South Kensington Numismatic Department. We thank you for your letter. As you grow older you will not mind “having your hair up” and so forth, but the feelings you express are natural enough for your age.—2. If we had “easier puzzles,” we should have so many solutions that the Puzzle Editor would be wholly buried alive under manuscripts, instead of only half buried, as he is at present. A LOVER OF THE “G.O.P.”—1. The whole sonnet by Archbishop Trench is as follows. We commend its advice to you with much sympathy:— “Thou cam’st not to thy place by accident; It is the very place God meant for thee; And shouldst thou there small scope for action see, Do not for this give room to discontent; Nor let the time thou owest to God be spent In idly dreaming how thou mightest be, In what concerns thy spiritual life, more free From outward hindrance or impediment. For presently this hindrance thou shalt find That without which all goodness were a task So slight, that virtue never could grow strong: And wouldst thou do one duty to His mind, The Imposer’s—over-burdened thou shalt ask, And own thy need of grace to help, ere long.” Archbishop Trench’s _Poems_ are published by Macmillan.—2. We do not think your writing is, as you say, “very bad.” The tails of your g’s and y’s are not bold enough for the rest of it. The only way to improve is daily to copy some model you admire, and never to let yourself write carelessly.