Viewing page 40 of 41

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

(COPY)

Morgan Hall, 
Fairford, Gloucestershire, England.

December 5, 1897.

Dear John:

I fear this is a much belated acknowledgement of your real kind, appreciative letter, the date of which I don't dare to look at.

I thank you very cordially for your sentiments, so agreeably expressed, and hope I deserve all I get, but at times in the dark or when I am alone, I have grave doubts and sometimes think I get things or have them thrust upon me that I don't care particularly about.

I have been leading a very quiet life for the last three months, doing double duty,for the manager of these premises has been away from me for nearly that length of time at her mother's bedside in America. The dear old lady died a week ago and I am getting anxious about Mrs. Abbey, who has had a long and anxious time. This makes her fourth trip to America in a twelve month, and I am hoping that the rest and quiet of her home will be good for her, but if not, we must seek a change.  Things have run along wonderfully smoothly in her absence and I have pretended a knowledge of things that I fear I cannot pass an examination in if I was cornered and it may be after all that wool has been pulled over my eyes to any extent.

Beatty floods me with newspapers full of the success of the Carnegie show. I hope it will be as good a thing as they hope and it should be if it can be kept out of the hands of cliques. I strongly object to the prize giving clause, not because I am afraid I would get left out entirely, but because it seems to me