By-and-by we came to packets of Miss Jenkyns’s letters.  These Miss Matty did regret to burn.  She said all the others had been only interesting to those who loved the writers, and that it seemed as if it would have hurt her to allow them to fall into the hands of strangers, who had not known her dear mother, and how good she was, although she did not always spell, quite in the modern fashion; but Deborah’s letters were so very superior!  Any one might profit by reading them.  It was a long time since she had read Mrs Chapone, but she knew she used to think that Deborah could have said the same things quite as well; and as for Mrs Carter! people thought a deal of her letters, just because she had written “Epictetus,” but she was quite sure Deborah would never have made use of such a common expression as “I canna be fashed!”

Miss Matty did grudge burning these letters, it was evident.  She would not let them be carelessly passed over with any quiet reading, and skipping, to myself.  She took them from me, and even lighted the second candle in order to read them aloud with a proper emphasis, and without stumbling over the big words.  Oh dear! how I wanted facts instead of reflections, before those letters were concluded!  They lasted us two nights; and I won’t deny that I made use of the time to think of many other things, and yet I was always at my post at the end of each sentence.

The rector’s letters, and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the lines very close together.  Sometimes the whole letter was contained on a mere scrap of paper.  The paper was very yellow, and the ink very brown; some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old original post, with the stamp in the corner representing a post-boy riding for life and twanging his horn.  The letters of Mrs Jenkyns and her mother were fastened with a great round red wafer; for it was before Miss Edgeworth’s “patronage” had banished wafers from polite society.  It was evident, from the tenor of what was said, that franks were in great request, and were even used as a means of paying debts by needy members of Parliament.  The rector sealed his epistles with an immense coat of arms, and showed by the care with which he had performed this ceremony that he expected they should be cut open, not broken by any thoughtless or impatient hand.  Now, Miss Jenkyns’s letters were of a later date in form and writing.  She wrote on the square sheet which we have learned to call old-fashioned.  Her hand was admirably calculated, together with her use of many-syllabled words, to fill up a sheet, and then came the pride and delight of crossing.  Poor Miss Matty got sadly puzzled with this, for the words gathered size like snowballs, and towards the end of her letter Miss Jenkyns used to become quite sesquipedalian.  In one to her father, slightly theological and controversial in its tone, she had spoken of Herod, Tetrarch of Idumea.  Miss Matty read it “Herod Petrarch of Etruria,” and was just as well pleased as if she had been right.