see; I may succeed with it better than I expect, and perhaps my audience may like to see me as a quiet, sober lady, after the Belvideras and Juliets and Euphrasias they have hitherto seen me represent.  I will tell you my dress:  it is a silver gray silk, and a white crape hat with drooping feathers.  I think it will be very pretty.  My father acts Beverley with me, which will be a great advantage to me.

Oh!  I must tell you of a delightful adventure which befell me the other night while I was acting in “The Grecian Daughter.”  Mr. Abbot, who personates my husband, Phocion, at a certain part of the play where we have to embrace, thought fit to clasp me so energetically in his arms that he threw me down, and fell down himself.  I fell seated, with all my draperies in most modest order, which was very fortunate, but certainly I never was more frightened or confused.  However, I soon recovered my presence of mind, and helped my better half on with his part, for he was quite aghast, poor man, at his own exploit, and I do believe would have been standing with his eyes and mouth wide open to this moment, if I had not managed to proceed with the scene somehow and anyhow.

I gave the commission for your print of me, dear H——­, to Colnaghi, and I hope you will like it, and that the more you look at it the stronger the likeness will appear to you.  Was my brother John returned from Germany, when last I wrote to you?  I forget.  However, he has just left us to take his degree at Cambridge, previous to being ordained.  Henry, too, returned yesterday to Paris, so that the house is in mourning for its liveliest inmates.  I continue quite well, and indeed I think my work agrees with me; or if I am a little tired with acting, why, a night’s dancing soon sets me right again.  T——­ B——­ is in town, and came to see me the other day.  I like her; she is a gentle, nice person; she is going back in a week to Cassiobury.  How I wish you and I had wings, and that Heath Farm belonged to us!  It is coming to the time of year when we first became acquainted; and, besides all its associations of kindly feeling and affectionate friendship, your image is connected in my mind with all the pleasantest things in nature—­the spring, May blossoms, glow-worms, “bright hill and bosky dell;” and it dates from somewhere “twixt the last violet and the earliest rose,” which is not a quotation, though I have put it in inverted commas, but something that just came to the tip of my pen and looks like poetry.  I must leave off now, for I got leave to stay at home to-night to write to you instead of going to the opera, with many injunctions that I would go to bed early; so, now it is late, I must do so.  Good-by, dearest H——­; believe me ever

Yours most affectionately,

F. A. K.