"You _must_ cure him of that bad habit," said cousin Judy to me once. It made me angry. What right had she to call any thing my husband did a bad habit? and to expect me to agree with her was ten times worse. I am saving my money now to buy him a grand new pipe; and I may just mention here, that once I spent ninepence out of my last shilling to get him a packet of Bristol bird's-eye, for he was on the point of giving up smoking altogether because of--well, because of what will appear by and by. England is getting dreadfully crowded with mean, ugly houses. If they were those of the poor and struggling, and not of the rich and comfortable, one might be consoled. But rich barbarism, in the shape of ugliness, is again pushing us to the sea. There, however, its "control stops;" and since I lived in London the sea has grown more precious to me than it was even in those lovely days at Kilkhaven,--merely because no one can build upon it. Ocean and sky remain as God made them. He must love space for us, though it be needless for himself; seeing that in all the magnificent notions of creation afforded us by astronomers,--shoal upon shoal of suns, each the centre of complicated and infinitely varied systems,--the spaces between are yet more overwhelming in their vast inconceivableness. I thank God for the room he thus gives us, and hence can endure to see the fair face of his England disfigured by the mud-pies of his children. There was in the garden a little summer-house, of which I was fond, chiefly because, knowing my passion for the flower, Percivale had surrounded it with a multitude of sweet peas, which, as they grew, he had trained over the trellis-work of its sides. Through them filtered the sweet airs of the summer as through an Æolian harp of unheard harmonies. To sit there in a warm evening, when the moth-airs just woke and gave two or three wafts of their wings and ceased, was like sitting in the midst of a small gospel. The summer had come on, and the days were very hot,--so hot and changeless, with their unclouded skies and their glowing centre, that they seemed to grow stupid with their own heat. It was as if--like a hen brooding over her chickens--the day, brooding over its coming harvests, grew dull and sleepy, living only in what was to come. Notwithstanding the feelings I have just recorded, I began to long for a wider horizon, whence some wind might come and blow upon me, and wake me up, not merely to live, but to know that I lived. One afternoon I left my little summer-seat, where I had been sitting at work, and went through the house, and down the precipice, into my husband's study. "It is so hot," I said, "I will try my little grotto: it may be cooler." He opened the door for me, and, with his palette on his thumb, and a brush in his hand, sat down for a moment beside me. "This heat is too much for you, darling," he said.