My amiable Miss Green, I beg you to give me news of your health, and if it may be good news. And when you shall have seen Lloyd, to tell me how his reports of the South Seas and our new circumstances strike such an awfully old person as yourself, and to tell me if you ever received a letter I sent you from Hawaii. I remember thinking--or remember remembering rather--it was (for me) quite a long respectable communication. Also, you might tell me if you got my war-whoop and scalping-knife assault on _le nomme_ Hyde. I ought not to forget to say your tale fetched me (Miss Green) by its really vile probability. If we had met that man in Honolulu he would have done it, and Miss Green would have done it. Only, alas! there is no completed novel lying in the garret: would there were! It should be out to-morrow with the name to it, and relieve a kind of tightness in the money market much deplored in our immediate circle. To be sure (now I come to think of it) there are some seven chapters of _The Great North Road_; three, I think, of _Robin Run the Hedge_, given up when some nefarious person pre-empted the name; and either there--or somewhere else--likely New York--one chapter of _David Balfour_, and five or six of the _Memoirs of Henry Shovel_. That's all. But Lloyd and I have one-half of The Wrecker in type, and a good part of _The Pearl Fisher_ (O, a great and grisly tale that!) in MS. And I have a projected, entirely planned love-story--everybody will think it dreadfully improper, I'm afraid--called _Cannonmills_. And I've a vague, rosy haze before me--a love-story too, but not improper--called _The Rising Sun_. (It's the name of the wayside inn where the story, or much of the story, runs; but it's a kind of a pun: it means the stirring up of a boy by falling in love, and how he rises in the estimation of a girl who despised him, though she liked him, and had befriended him; I really scarce see beyond their childhood yet, but I want to go beyond, and make each out-top the other by successions: it should be pretty and true if I could do it.) Also I have my big book, _The South Seas_, always with me, and a sair handfu'--if I may be allowed to speak Scotch to Miss Green--a sair handfu' it is likely to be. All this literary gossip I bestow upon you _entre confreres_, Miss Green, which is little more than fair, Miss Green. Allow me to remark that it is now half-past twelve o'clock of the living night; I should certainly be ashamed of myself, and you also; for this is no time of the night for Miss Green to be colloguing with a comparatively young gentleman of forty. So with all the kindest wishes to yourself, and all at Lostock, and all friends in Hants, or over the borders in Dorset, I bring my folly to an end. Please believe, even when I am silent, in my real affection; I need not say the same for Fanny, more obdurately silent, not less affectionate than I.--Your friend, ROBERT--ROBIN LEWISON. (Nearly had it wrong--force of habit.)