they cleared the table as we sate; it was over before six, and it was not till the prayer-bell rang at 9.30 that we became aware we had sate the whole evening with the table between us.  What did we talk about?  I wish to Heaven I could sit and talk like that now!  That is another thing which grows upon me, my dislike of mere chatting:  it is not priggish to say it, because I regret and abominate my stupidity in that respect.  But there is nothing now which induces more rapid and more desperate physical fatigue than to sit still and know I have to pump up talk for an hour.

The moral of all this is that you must take good care to form habits, and I must take care to unform them.  You must resist the temptation to read the papers, to stroll, to talk to your children; and I must try to cultivate leisurely propensities.  I think that, as a schoolmaster, one might do very good work as a peripatetic talker.  I have a big garden here—­to think that you have never seen it!—­with a great screen of lilacs and some pleasant gravel walks.  I never enter it, I am afraid.  But if in the pleasant summer I could learn the art of sitting there, of having tea there, and making a few boys welcome if they cared to come, it would be good for all of us, and would give the boys some pleasant memories.  I don’t think there is anything gives me a pleasanter thrill than to recollect the times I spent as a boy in old Hayward’s garden.  He told me and Francis Howard that we might go and sit there if we liked.  You were not invited, and I never dared to ask him.  It was a pleasant little place, with a lawn surrounded with trees, and a summer-house full of armchairs, with an orchard behind it—­now built over.  Howard and I used at one time to go there a good deal, to read and talk.  I remember him reading Shakespeare’s sonnets aloud, though I had not an idea what they were all about—­but his rich, resonant voice comes back to me now; and then he showed me a Ms. book of his own poems.  Ye Gods, how great I thought them!  I copied many of them out and have them still.  Hayward used to come strolling about; I can see him standing there in a big straw hat, with his hands behind him, like the jolly old leisurely fellow he was.  “Don’t get up, boys,” he used to say.  Once or twice he sate with us, and talked lazily about some book we were reading.  He never took any trouble to entertain us, but I used to feel that we were welcome, and that it really pleased him that we cared to come.  Now he lives in a suburb, on a pension:  why do I never go to see him?

“La, Perry, how yer do run on!” as the homely Warden’s wife said to the voluble Chaplain.  I never meant to write you such a letter; but I am glad indeed to find you really settling down.  We must cultivate our garden, as Voltaire said; and I only wish that the garden of my own spirit were more full of “shelter and fountains,” and less stocked with long rows of humble vegetables; but there are a few flowers here and there.—­Ever yours,