even upon the only condition on which I ever do go, that is, into lodgings, for I never stay anywhere; and if I were to go, even to one dear and warm-hearted friend, I should affront the very many other friends whose invitations I have refused for so many years.  I hope to get at Mr. Kingsley; but I have seen little of him this winter.  We are five miles asunder; his wife has been ill; and my fear of an open carriage, or rather the medical injunction not to enter one, has been a most insuperable objection.  We are, as we both said, summer neighbors.  However, I will try that you should see him.  He is well worth knowing.  Thank you about Mr. Blackstone.  He is worth knowing too, in a different way, a very learned and very clever man (you will find half Dr. Arnold’s letters addressed to him), as full of crotchets as an egg is full of meat, fond of disputing and contradicting, a clergyman living in the house where Mrs. Trollope was raised, and very kind after his own fashion.  One thing that I should especially like would be that you should see your first nightingale amongst our woody lanes.  To be sure, these winds can never last till then.  Mr. ——­ is coming here on Sunday.  He always brings rain or snow, and that will change the weather.  You are a person who ought to bring sunshine, and I suppose you do more than metaphorically; for I remember that both times I have had the happiness to see you—­a summer day and a winter day—­were glorious.  Heaven bless you, dear friend!  May all the pleasure ... return upon your own head!  Even my little world is charmed at the prospect of seeing you again.  If you come to Reading by the Great Western you could return later and make a longer day, and yet be no longer from home.

    Ever faithfully yours, M.R.M.

    Swallowfield, April 27, 1852.

How can I thank you half enough, dearest Mr. Fields, for all your goodness!  To write to me the very day after reaching Paris, to think of me so kindly!  It is what I never can repay.  I write now not to trouble you for another letter, but to remind you that, as soon as possible after your return to England, I hope to see you and Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch here.  Heaven grant the spring may come to meet you!  At present I am writing in an east-wind, which has continued two months and gives no sign of cessation.  Professor Airy says it will continue five weeks longer.  Not a drop of rain has fallen in all that time.  We have frosts every night, the hedges are as bare as at Christmas, flowers forget to blow, or if they put forth miserable, infrequent, reluctant blossoms, have no heart, and I have only once heard the nightingale in this place where they abound, and not yet seen a swallow in the spot which takes name from their gatherings.  It follows, of course, that the rheumatism, covered by a glut of wet weather, just upon the coming in of the new year, is fifty times increased by the bitter season,—­a season which has no parallel in my recollection.