I fear I shall not be in London next week. But if you will kindly send me here, at your leisure, the roughest notes of such points as I have indicated, I shall be heartily obliged to you, and will take care of their falling into shape and order in my mind. Meantime I "make a note of" Monday, 27th September, and of writing to you touching your kind offer of hospitality, three weeks before that date. I beg to send my kind regard to Mrs. and Miss Ryland, and am always, Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frederic Ouvry.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Aug. 22nd, 1869._ MY DEAR OUVRY, I will expect a call from you at the office, on Thursday, at your own most convenient hour. I admit the soft impeachment concerning Mrs. Gamp: I likes my payments to be made reg'lar, and I likewise likes my publisher to draw it mild. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Ryland.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, Sept. 6th, 1869._ MY DEAR MR. RYLAND, I am sorry to find--I had a foreshadowing of it some weeks ago--that I shall not be able to profit by your kind offer of hospitality when I come to Birmingham for _our_ Institution. I must come down in time for a quiet dinner at the hotel with my "Readings" secretary, Mr. Dolby, and must away next morning. Besides having a great deal in hand just now (the title of a new book among other things), I shall have visitors from abroad here at the time, and am severely claimed by my daughter, who indeed is disloyal to Birmingham in the matter of my going away at all. Pray represent me to Mrs. Ryland as the innocent victim of circumstances, and as sacrificing pleasure to the work I have to do, and to the training under which alone I can do it without feeling it. You will see from the enclosed that I am in full force, and going to finish my readings, please God, after Christmas. I am in the hope of receiving your promised notes in due course, and continue in the irreverent condition in which I last reported myself on the subject of speech-making. Now that men not only make the nights of the session hideous by what the Americans call "orating" in Parliament, but trouble the peace of the vacation by saying over again what they said there (with the addition of what they _didn't_ say there, and never will have the courage to say there), I feel indeed that silence, like gold across the Atlantic, is a rarity at a premium. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Thursday, Oct. 7th, 1869._ MY DEAR KENT,