Mary Boyle was here a little while ago, as affectionate at heart as ever, as young, and as pleasant. Of course we talked often of you. So let me know when you are established in Halfmoon Street, and I shall be truly delighted to come and see you. For my attachments are strong attachments and never weaken. In right of bygones, I feel as if "all Northamptonshire" belonged to me, as all Northumberland did to Lord Bateman in the ballad. In memory of your warming your feet at the fire in that waste of a waiting-room when I read at Brighton, I have ever since taken that watering-place to my bosom as I never did before. And you and Switzerland are always one to me, and always inseparable. Charley was heard of yesterday, from Shanghai, going to Japan, intending to meet his brother Walter at Calcutta, and having an idea of beguiling the time between whiles by asking to be taken as an amateur with the English Chinese forces. Everybody caressed him and asked him everywhere, and he seemed to go. With kind regards, my dear Mrs. Watson, Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Sept. 23rd, 1860._ ON THE DEATH OF HIS MOTHER. MY DEAR E. Y., I did not write to you in your bereavement, because I knew that the girls had written to you, and because I instinctively shrunk from making a form of what was so real. _You_ knew what a loving and faithful remembrance I always had of your mother as a part of my youth--no more capable of restoration than my youth itself. All the womanly goodness, grace, and beauty of my drama went out with her. To the last I never could hear her voice without emotion. I think of her as of a beautiful part of my own youth, and this dream that we are all dreaming seems to darken. But it is not to say this that I write now. It comes to the point of my pen in spite of me. "Holding up the Mirror" is in next week's number. I have taken out all this funeral part of it. Not because I disliked it (for, indeed, I thought it the best part of the paper), but because it rather grated on me, going over the proof at that time, as a remembrance that would be better reserved a little while. Also because it made rather a mixture of yourself as an individual, with something that does not belong or attach to you as an individual. You can have the MS.; and as a part of a paper describing your own juvenile remembrances of a theatre, there it is, needing no change or adaption. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Sept. 23rd, 1860._ MY DEAREST MAMIE,