Now it will be a surprise, perhaps a very great surprise, to some of my genuine town friends, to learn that even a country parson--who after all is a man and a brother--gets pretty much the same sort of letters that other people do. He gets offers to assign to him shares in gold mines; offers of three dozen and four, positively all that is left, of that transcendental sherry; offers to make him a life governor of the new college for criminals; invitations to be a steward at a public dinner of the Society for Diminishing Felony; above all, he gets some very elegant letters from gentlemen in very high positions in society offering to lend him money. I do verily believe these scoundrels, who invariably write a good hand on crested paper and express themselves in a style which is above all praise, are in league with one of my banker’s clerks. How else does it happen that, as sure as ever my account is very low and that I am in mortal terror lest my last cheque should be returned dishonoured, so sure am I to hear from one of these diabolical tempters? There’s one scarlet Mephistopheles who _must_ know all about my financial position. How else could he have thought of sending me two of his gilt-edged seductions in a single week just when my banking account was overdrawn? It is absurd to pretend that he keeps a _medium_. Moreover, proof sheets come by post even in this wilderness, and they have to be corrected, too; and real letters that are not begging letters come, some kind and comforting, some stern and uncompromising, some with the oddest inquiries and criticisms. Sometimes, too, anonymous letters come. What a queer state of mind a man must have got himself into before he can sit down to write an anonymous letter! Does any man in his senses ever _read_ an anonymous letter of four pages? If he does, the _writer_ gets no fun out of it. I am inclined to think that the practice of writing anonymous letters is dying out now that the schoolmaster is abroad; and yet, they tell me, insanity is not decreasing. Then, too, there are the newspapers. I could live without butter--I shouldn’t like it, but I could submit to it; or without eggs, though I dislike snow pancakes; or without sugar--and there are some solids and some liquids that are insipid without that; but there is one thing I could not do without--I could not do without the _Times_. We have tried again and again to economize by having a penny paper, but it has always ended in the same way. As _entremets_ they are all delightful, but for a square meal give me the _Times_. Without it “the appetite is distracted by the variety of objects, and tantalized by the restlessness of perpetual solicitation,” till, when the day is done, the mind wearies under “a feeling of satiety without satisfaction, and of repletion without sustenance.”