to hold those golden keys of the future with a more resolute hand than your contemporaries, should you suffer yourself to be struck down before the gate ... should you lose the physical power while keeping the heart and will.  Heart and will are great things, and sufficient things in your case—­but after all we carry a barrow-full of clay about with us, and we must carry it a little carefully if we mean to keep to the path and not run zigzag into the border of the garden.  A figure which reminds me ... and I wanted no figure to remind me ... to ask you to thank your sister for me and from me for all her kindness about the flowers.  Now you will not forget? you must not.  When I think of the repeated trouble she has taken week after week, and all for a stranger, I must think again that it has been very kind—­and I take the liberty of saying so moreover ... as I am not thanking you.  Also these flowers of yesterday, which yesterday you disdained so, look full of summer and are full of fragrance, and when they seem to say that it is not September, I am willing to be lied to just so.  For I wish it were not September.  I wish it were July ... or November ... two months before or after:  and that this journey were thrown behind or in front ... anywhere to be out of sight.  You do not know the courage it requires to hold the intention of it fast through what I feel sometimes.  If it (the courage) had been prophesied to me only a year ago, the prophet would have been laughed to scorn.  Well!—­but I want you to see.  George’s letter, and how he and Mrs. Hedley, when she saw Papa’s note of consent to me, give unhesitating counsel.  Burn it when you have read it.  It is addressed to me ... which you will doubt from the address of it perhaps ... seeing that it goes [Greek:  ba ... rbarizon].  We are famous in this house for what are called nick-names ... though a few of us have escaped rather by a caprice than a reason:  and I am never called anything else (never at all) except by the nom de paix which you find written in the letter:—­proving as Mr. Kenyon says, that I am just ‘half a Ba-by’ ... no more nor less;—­and in fact the name has that precise definition.  Burn the note when you have read it.

And then I take it into my head, as you do not distinguish my sisters, you say, one from the other, to send you my own account of them in these enclosed ‘sonnets’ which were written a few weeks ago, and though only pretending to be ‘sketches,’ pretend to be like, as far as they go, and are like—­my brothers thought—­when I ’showed them against’ a profile drawn in pencil by Alfred, on the same subjects.  I was laughing and maintaining that mine should be as like as his—­and he yielded the point to me.  So it is mere portrait-painting—­and you who are in ‘high art,’ must not be too scornful.  Henrietta is the elder, and the one who brought you into this room first—­and Arabel, who means to go with me to Pisa, has been the most with me through my illness and is the least