“I think I may safely treat myself to John Richard Green’s Making of England and Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, so please post them. Everything looking first-rate. Laura is writing too.

“Your loving son,

Hubert Stamford.”

Next came a letter in a neat, characteristic, legible hand, not angular-feminine, which he well knew:—

“Oh! darling Dad,—We are all gone straight out of our senses with joy. We have had such blessed and beauteous rain. The windows of Heaven have indeed been opened—where else could such a lovely downpour come from?

50“All our doubts and fears are cleared away. Hubert has been working himself to death, poor boy; off before daylight and never home till twelve or one in the morning. He says that we shall have the best season known for years, and that nothing can possibly hurt the grass for a whole twelvemonth. Besides, more rain is sure to come. They always say that though. Some water came through here and there, but it was a blessing that Hubert and the old splitter put the new roof over the kitchen before the drought broke up. The dear garden looks lovely, I have been sowing a few flower seeds—so fresh and beautiful it is already.

“I rode to one of the out-stations with Hubert yesterday, and we got such glorious ferns coming back. I am sorry to say dear mother is not over strong. The hot weather, and the old trouble, ‘no servants,’ have been too much for her. Do you think you could bring back a good, willing girl as cook and laundress—that would shift the hardest part of the work off our shoulders—and I think Linda and I coul