“Roaring gray” suggests Tennyson, whom I do very much associate with this sort of weather, not so much because of passages in “Maud” and “In Memoriam” as because I once went over to Swainston, on a day such as this when rooks and leaves alike hung helpless in the wind; and heard there the story of how Tennyson, coming over for his friend’s funeral, would not go into the house, but asked for one of Sir John’s old hats, and with that on his head sat in the garden and wrote almost the best of his small lyrics: 

    “Nightingales warbled without,
     Within was weeping for thee.”

The “old hat” was mentioned as something humorous:  yet an old glove is the most accepted symbol of faithful absence:  and why should head rank lower than hand?  What creatures of convention we are!

There is an old notion, quite likely to be true, that a nightcap carries in it the dreams of its first owner, or that anything laid over a sleeper’s head will bring away the dream.  One of the stories which used to put a lump in my throat as a child was of an old backwoodsman who by that means found out that his dog stole hams from the storeroom.  The dog was given away in disgrace, and came to England to die of a broken heart at the sight of a cargo of hams, which, at their unpacking, seemed like a monstrous day of judgment—­the bones of his misdeeds rising again reclothed with flesh to reproach him with the thing he had never forgotten.

I wonder how long it was before I left off definitely choosing out a story for the pleasure of making myself cry!  When one begins to avoid that luxury of the fledgling emotions, the first leaf of youth is flown.

To-day I look almost jovially at the decay of the best year I have ever lived through, and am your very middle-aged faithful and true.

LETTER XLVIII.

Dearest:  If anybody has been “calling me names” that are not mine, they do me a fine injury, and you did well to purge the text of their abuse.  I agree with no authority, however immortal, which inquires “What’s in a name?” expecting the answer to be a snap of the fingers.  I answer with a snap of temper that the blood, boots, and bones of my ancestors are in mine!  Do you suppose I could have been the same woman had such names as Amelia or Bella or Cinderella been clinging leechlike to my consciousness through all the years of my training?  Why, there are names I can think of which would have made me break down into side-ringlets had I been forced to wear them audibly.

The effect is not so absolute when it is a second name that can be tucked away if unpresentable, but even then it is a misfortune.  There is C——­, now, who won’t marry, I believe, chiefly because of the insane “Annie” with which she was smitten at the baptismal font by an afterthought.  She regards it as a taint in her constitution which orders her to a lonely life lest worse might follow.