despair, meaning to take the railroad to Dieppe; when lo! our examining forces find that the place here is very tenable, and we take a house close to the sea (though the view is interrupted) in a green garden, and quite away from a suggestion of streets and commerce. The bathing is good, we have a post-office and reading-rooms at our elbow, and nothing distracting of any kind. The house is large and airy, and our two families are lodged in separate apartments, though we meet at dinner in our dining-room. Certainly the country immediately around Havre is not pretty, but we came for the sea after all, and the sea is open and satisfactory. Robert has found a hole I can creep through to the very shore, without walking many yards, and there I can sit on a bench and get strength, if so it pleases God. Have I not sent you a full account of us? Now if you would return me a cent. per cent.--_soll und haben_. I want so much to know all about you--how you feel, dearest friend, and how you are. Do write and tell me of yourself. May God bless you ever and ever! Your affectionate and grateful BA. * * * * * _To Madame Braun_ 2 Rue do Perry, Le Havre, Maison Versigny: August 10 [1858]. My dearest Madame Braun,--If you have not heard from me before, it has not been that I have not thought of you anxiously and tenderly, but I had the idea that so many must be thinking of you, and saying to you with sad faces 'they were sorry,' that I kept away, not to be the one too many. It seems so vain when we sympathise with a suffering friend. And yet it is _something_--oh yes, I have felt that! But you _knew_ I must feel for you, if I teased you with words or not; and I, for my part, hearing of you from others, felt shy, as I say, till I heard you were better, of writing to you myself. And you _are_ feeling better, Mrs. Jameson tells me, and are somewhat more cheerful about your state. I thank God for this good news.... One of the few reasons for which I regret our absence from England this summer is that I miss seeing you with my own eyes, and I should like much to see you and talk to you of things of interest to both of us. If illness suppresses in us a few sources of pleasure, it leaves the real _ich_ open to influences and keen-sighted to _facts_ which are as surely _natural_ as the fly's wing, though we are apt to consider them vaguely as 'supernatural.'