much, that truly I have scarce an idea left that is not spotted with clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds.  There is a vote of the Strawberry committee for great embellishments to the chapel, of which it will not be long before you hear something.  It will not be longer than the spring, I trust, before you see something of it.  In the mean time, to rest your impatience, I have enclosed a scratch of mine which you are to draw out better, and try if you can give yourself a perfect idea of the place.  All I can say is, that my sketch is at least more intelligible than Gray’s was of Stoke, from which you made so like a picture.

Thank you much for the box of Guernsey lilies, which I have received.  I have been packing up a few seeds, which have little merit but the merit they will have with you, that they come from the Vine and Strawberry.  My chief employ in this part of the world, except surveying my library which has scarce any thing but the painting to finish, is planting at Mrs. Clive’s, whither I remove all my superabundancies.  I have lately planted the green lane, that leads from her garden to the common:  “Well,” said she, “when it is done, what shall we call it?"-” Why,” said I, " what would you call it but Drury Lane?” I mentioned desiring some samples of your Swiss’s(521 abilities:  Mr. Chute and I even propose, if he should be tolerable, and would continue reasonable, to tempt him over hither, and make him work upon your designs-upon which, you know, it is not easy to make you work.  If he improves upon your hands, do you think we shall purchase the fee-simple of him for so many years, as Mr. Smith did of Canaletti?(522) We will sell to the English.  Can he paint perspectives, and cathedral-aisles, and holy glooms?  I am sure you could make him paint delightful insides of the chapel at the Vine, and of the library here.  I never come up the stairs without reflecting how different it is from its primitive state, when my Lady Townshend all the way she came up the stairs, cried out, “Lord God!  Jesus! what a house!  It is just such a house as a parson’s, where the children lie at the feet of the bed!” I cant say that to-day it puts me much in mind of another speech of my lady’s, “That it would be a very pleasant place, if Mrs. Clive’s face did not rise upon it and make it so hot!” The sun and Mrs. Clive seem gone for the winter.

The West Indian war has thrown me into a new study:  I read nothing but American voyages, and histories of plantations and settlements.  Among all the Indian nations, I have contracted a particular intimacy with the Ontaouanoucs, a people with whom I beg you will be acquainted:  they pique themselves upon speaking the purest dialect.  How one should delight in the grammar and dictionary of their Crusca!  My only fear is, that if any of them are taken prisoners, General Braddock is not a kind of man to have proper attentions to so polite a people; I am even apprehensive that he would damn them, and order them to be scalped,