"DEAREST EMILY,-After suffering more dreadfully in the two hours' passage from Folkestone to this place than I have in four passages out and home from India, except in that terrible storm off the Cape, in September 1824, when I certainly did suffer most cruelly on board that horrible troopship, we reached this place last Saturday evening, having a full determination to proceed immediately on our route. Now, you will perceive that our minds are changed. We found this place pleasant, and the lodgings besides most neat, comfortable, and well found in everything, more reasonable than you proposed to get for us at Tours, which I am told also is damp, and might bring on the General's jungle fever again. Owing to the hooping-cough having just been in the house, which, praised be mercy, all my dear ones have had it, including dear baby, who is quite well through it, and recommended sea air, we got this house more reasonable than prices you mention at Tours. A whole house: little room for two boys; nursery; nice little room for Charlotte, and a den for the General. I don't know how ever we should have brought our party safe all the way to Tours. Thirty-seven articles of luggage, and Miss Flixby, who announced herself as perfect French governess, acquired at Parisperfect, but perfectly useless. She can't understand the French people when they speak to her, and goes about the house in a most bewildering way. I am the interpreter; poor Charlotte is much too timid to speak when I am by. I have rubbed up the old French which we learned at Chiswick at Miss Pinkerton's; and I find my Hindostanee of great help: which I use it when we are at a loss for a word, and it answers extremely well. We pay for lodgings, the whole house francs per month. Butchers' meat and poultry plentiful but dear. A grocer in the Grande Rue sells excellent wine at fifteenpence per bottle; and groceries pretty much at English prices. Mr. Blowman at the English chapel of the Tintelleries has a fine voice, and appears to be a most excellent clergyman. I have heard him only once, however, on Sunday evening, when I was so agitated and so unhappy in my mind that I own I took little note of his sermon.

"The cause of that agitation you know, having imparted it to

you in my letters of July, June, and 24th of May, ult. My poor simple guileless Baynes was trustee to Mrs. Dr. Firmin, before she married that most unprincipled man. When we were at home last, and exchanged to the 120th from the 99th, my poor husband was inveigled by the horrid man into signing a paper which put the Doctor in possession of all his wife's property; whereas Charles thought he was only signing a power of attorney, enabling him to receive his son's dividends. Dr. F., after the most atrocious deceit, forgery, and criminality of every kind, fled the country; and Hunt and Pegler, our solicitors, informed us that the General was answerable for the wickedness of this miscreant. He is so weak that he has been many and many times on the point of going to young Mr. F. and giving up everything. It was only by my prayers, by my commands, that I have been enabled to keep him quiet; and, indeed, Emily, the effort has almost killed him. Brandy repeatedly I was obliged to administer on the dreadful night of our arrival here.

"For the first person we met on landing was Mr. Philip Firmin, with a pert friend of his, Mr. Pendennis, whom I don't at all like, though his wife is an amiable person like Emma Fletcher of the Horse Artillery: not with Emma's style, however, but still amiable, and disposed to be most civil. Charlotte has taken a great fancy to her, as she always does to every new person. Well, fancy our state on landing, when a young gentleman calls out, 'How do you do, General?' and turns out to be Mr. Firmin! I thought I should have lost Charles in the night. I have seen him before going into action as calm, and sleep and smile as sweet as any babe. It was all I could do to keep up his courage: and, but for me, but for my prayers, but for my agonies, I think he would have jumped out of bed, and gone to Mr. F. that night, and said, 'Take everything I have.' "The young man I own has behaved in the most honourable He came to see us before breakfast on Sunday, when the poor General was so ill that I thought he would have fainted over his tea. He was too ill to go to church, where I went alone, with my dear ones, having, as I own, but very small comfort in the sermon: but oh, Emily, fancy, on our return, when I went into our room, I found my General on his knees with his Church Service before him, crying, crying like a baby! You know I am hasty in my temper sometimes, and his is indeed an angel's—and I said to him, 'Charles Baynes, be a man, and don't cry like a child!' Ah,' says

way.

he, 'Eliza, do you kneel, and thank God too;' on which I said that I thought I did not require instruction in my religion from him or any man, except a clergyman, and many of these are but poor instructors, as you know.

"He has been here,' says Charles; when I said, 'Who has been here?' 'That noble young fellow,' says my General; 'that noble noble Philip Firmin.' Which noble his conduct I own it has been. 'Whilst you were at church he came again-here into this very room, where I was sitting, doubting and despairing, with the Holy Book before my eyes, and no comfort out of it. And he said to me, "General, I want to talk to you about my grandfather's will. You don't suppose that because my father has deceived you and ruined me, I will carry the ruin farther, and visit his wrong upon children and innocent people?" Those were the young man's words,' my General said; and, 'oh, Eliza!' says he, 'what pangs of remorse I felt when I remembered we had used hard words about him,' which I own we had, for his manners are rough and haughty, and I have heard things of him which I do believe now can't be true.

"All Monday my poor man was obliged to keep his bed with a smart attack of his fever. But yesterday he was quite bright and well again, and the Pendennis party took Charlotte for a drive, and showed themselves most polite. She reminds me of Mrs. Tom Fletcher of the Horse Artillery, but that I think I have mentioned before. My paper is full; and with our best to MacWhirter and the children, I am always my dearest Emily's affectionate sister,

"ELIZA BAYNES."
"

N

CHAPTER XVII

BREVIS ESSE LABORO

EVER, General Baynes afterwards declared, did fever come and go so pleasantly as that attack to which we have seen the Mrs. General advert in her letter to her sister, Mrs. Major MacWhirter. The cold fit was merely a lively pleasant chatter and rattle of the teeth; the hot fit an agreeable warmth; and though the ensuing sleep, with which I believe such aguish attacks are usually concluded, was enlivened by several dreams of death, demons, and torture, how felicitous it was to wake and find that dreadful thought of ruin removed which had always, for the last few months, ever since Dr. Firmin's flight and the knowledge of his own imprudence, pursued the good-natured gentleman! What! this boy might go to college, and that get his commission; and their meals need be embittered by no more dreadful thoughts of the morrow, and their walks no longer were dogged by imaginary bailiffs, and presented a gaol in the vista! It was too much bliss; and again and again the old soldier said his thankful prayers, and blessed his benefactor.

Good

Philip thought no more of his act of kindness, except to be very grateful, and very happy that he had rendered other people so. He could no more have taken the old man's all, and plunged that innocent family into poverty, than he could have stolen the forks off my table. But other folks were disposed to rate his virtue much more highly; and amongst these was my wife, who chose positively to worship this young gentleman, and I believe would have let him smoke in her drawing-room if he had been so minded, and though her genteelest acquaintances were in the room. ness knows what a noise and what piteous looks are produced if ever the master of the house chooses to indulge in a cigar after dinner; but then, you understand, I have never declined to claim mine and my children's right because an old gentleman would be inconvenienced: and this is what I tell Mrs. Pen. If I order a coat from my tailor, must I refuse to pay him because a rogue steals it, and ought I to expect to be let off? Women won't see matters of fact in a matter-of-fact point of view, and

justice, unless it is tinged with a little romance, gets no respect from them.

So, forsooth, because Philip has performed this certainly most generous, most dashing, most reckless piece of extravagance, he is to be held up as a perfect preux chevalier. The most riotous dinners are ordered for him. We are to wait until he comes to breakfast, and he is pretty nearly always late. The children are to be sent round to kiss Uncle Philip, as he is now called. The children? I wonder the mother did not jump up and kiss him too. Elle en était capable. As for the osculations which took place between Mrs. Pendennis and her new-found young friend, Miss Charlotte Baynes, they were perfectly ridiculous; two school children could not have behaved more absurdly; and I don't know which seemed to be the younger of these two. There were colloquies, assignations, meetings on the ramparts, on the pier, where know I? -and the servants and little children of the two establishments were perpetually trotting to and fro with letters from dearest Laura to dearest Charlotte, and dearest Charlotte to her dearest Mrs. Pendennis. Why, my wife absolutely went the length of saying that dearest Charlotte's mother, Mrs. Baynes, was a worthy clever woman, and a good mother-a woman whose tongue never ceased clacking about the regiment, and all the officers, and all the officers' wives; of whom, by the way, she had very little good to tell.

"A worthy mother, is she, my dear?" I say. “But, oh, mercy! Mrs. Baynes would be an awful mother-in-law !" I shuddered at the thought of having such a commonplace, hard, ill-bred woman in a state of quasi-authority over me.

On this Mrs. Laura must break out in quite a petulant tone"Oh, how stale this kind of thing is, Arthur, from a man qui veut passer pour un homme d'esprit ! You are always attacking

mothers-in-law!"

"Witness Mrs. Mackenzie, my love-Clive Newcome's motherin-law. That's a nice creature; not selfish, not wicked, not"Not nonsense, Arthur!" "Mrs. Baynes knew Mrs. Mackenzie in the West Indies, as she knew all the female army. She considers Mrs. Mackenzie was a most elegant handsome dashing woman-only a little too fond of the admiration of our sex. There was, I own, a fascination about Captain Goby. Do you remember, my love, that man with the stays and dyed hair, who

"Oh, Arthur! When our girls marry, I suppose you will teach their husbands to abuse, and scorn, and mistrust their motherin-law. Will he, my darlings? will he, my blessings?"

(This