reputation for cleverness and paradox is bad for a man—a sort of "heritage of woe" as Law said.
Pardon this long screed—my excuse must be that it is raining. Poor little David!—but we have all had that sad experience in some degree—to lose our own selves; but to boys sent far from home to public schools for instance, it must sometimes be terrible. Tell him, to console him, that by and by or in some future time he will find it again—that it will seem all the more precious and beautiful then.
With kindest regards to Mrs. Garnett,
W. H. Hudson
3 Mansfield Cottage
Hunstanton
Norfolk.
17 Aug. [1904]
Dear Garnett
How, I wonder, are you and yours? I hope Mrs. Garett has been benefited, and I suppose David has been thoroughly Russianized. I ought to have written to you before—when I came here—for then I could have expected a line from you by now. We came here a week ago and arrived on a pouring wet day and were told that there was not a room to be had in the place. We tried the hotels and they were full up, but after trudging about in the rain and wind for some hours we "happened" on this cottage, a small old house built of yellow-brown c———stone, and luckily the people they had had had just left. (3 hads). The landlady is a poor tall pale gaunt woman with a large nose, very sad looking, with one boy of ten her only family. Her furniture was rather poor, and her terms low, so we only took it by the day. But this poor soul is a most interesting human being and we shall stay here all the time. She is the daughter of a farmer near Lyne, and twelve years ago married a mold man who took her to his town and was a drunkard and bad fellow in all ways; so she took her boy and left him and came back to her own country to make her living and her boys. She is in spite of her ungainly outside a most worthy and even lovable person, and her boy a curiously interesting little fellow, very grave
