BEST OF BEANS,—I am having quite a good time here, after all. One of the carriage horses isn’t at all a bad hack and there’s some ripping country. At the end of Hargest Ridge there’s an old race-course which hasn’t been used for centuries, where you can gallop for miles. Aunt Verena looks perfectly fit but she has to keep still. She is awfully decent to me and really wants to set me on my feet. Why is it that Aunts and Uncles can be so much jollier and more sympathetic than fond parents? One of Nesta’s kids is here too—Lobbie—and we have a great rag every bed-time. Aunt Verena doesn’t seem to think that I am cut out for the Diplomatic Service. Perhaps not. Personally I should prefer to manage an estate. If it comes to the worst, there’s always the stage, but after the Stella incident the very thought of singing musical-comedy songs makes me shudder. There’s rather a nice Irish girl here, who reads to Aunt Verena, named Clemency Power. She was in a canteen in France during the War. I never met a Clemency before. She’s got a heavenly touch of brogue. Tell me all about things and how the home-barometer reads. Is it still “Stormy”?—Yours till Hell freezes, ROY CV RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY MY DEAR, with a view to getting assistance towards the solution of the great testamentary problem, I went yesterday to see Bemerton the bookseller and inquire about the literature of charity (for, as that witty cleric, the late Dean Beeching, wrote:— It all comes out of the books I read And it all goes into the books I write —or, more accurately, the letters I write, for I have never touched authorship proper) and he produced from those inexhaustible shelves a report on alms-houses and kindred endowments published in 1829 under the title _The Endowed Charities of the City of London_. This exceedingly formidable tome I am going to peruse and send you the results; and really I don’t think I could do a more disinterested thing, for none of your money is coming to me, and it consists of nearly eight-hundred double-column pages of the kind of small type into which the Editor of the _Times_ puts the letters of the most insignificant of his correspondents. Bemerton, by the way, told me a very nice ghost story which, when I can find an hour or two, I am going to write out for you. It was told him by a distinguished Orientalist, and he believes it and I should like to.