the recovery of health and strength for this service, and I am willing to hope with good effect. Ten months have passed since I discontinued my poetical efforts; I do not expect to find the same readiness as before, till exercise of the neglected faculty, such as it is, shall have restored it to me.

I enter

You find yourself, I hope, by this time, as comfortably situated in your new abode, as in a new abode one can be. perfectly into all your feelings on occasion of the change. A sensible mind cannot do violence even to a local attachment, without much pain, When my Father died I was young, too young to have reflected much, He was Rector of Berkhamstead, and there I was born. It had never occurred to me that a parson has no feesimple in the house and glebe he occupies. There was neither tree nor gate, nor stile, in all that country, to which I did not feel a relation, and the house itself I preferred to a palace. I was sent for from London to attend him in his last illness, and he died just before I arrived. Then, and not till then, I felt for the first time that I and my native place were disunited for ever. I sighed a long adieu to fields and woods, from which I once thought I should never be parted, and was at no time so sensible of their beauties as just when I left them all behind me, to return no more.

LETTER LXXV.

To Lady HESKeth.

The Lodge, Nov. 10, 1787.

The Parliament, my dearest Cousin,

I

prorogued continually, is a meteor dancing before my eyes, promising me my wish only to disappoint me, and none but the King and his Ministers can tell when you and I shall come together. hope, however, that the period, though so often postponed, is not far distant, and that once more I shall behold you, and experience your power to make winter gay and sprightly.

I have a Kitten, my dear, the drollest of all creatures that ever wore a cat's skin. Her gambols are not to be described, and would be incredible, if they could. In point of size she is likely to be a kitten always, being extremely small of her age, but time, I suppose, that spoils every thing, will make her also a cat. You will see her, I hope, before that melancholy period shall arrive, for no wisdom that she may gain by experience and reflection hereafter, will compensate the loss of her present hilarity. She is dressed in a tortoise-shell suit, and I know that you will delight in her.

Mrs. Throckmorton carries us to-morrow in her chaise to Chicheley. The event, however, must be supposed to depend on elements, at least on the state of the atmosphere, which is turbulent

beyond

beyond measure. Yesterday it thundered; last night it lightened, and at three this morning I saw the sky as red as a city in flames. could have made it. I have a Leech in a bottle that foretells all these prodigies and convulsions of nature. No, not as you will naturally conjecture, by articulate utterance of oracular notices, but by a variety of gesticulations, which here I have not room to give an account of. Suffice it to say, that no change of weather surprises him, and that in point of the earliest and most accurate intelligence, he is worth all the Barometers in the world-none of them all indeed can make the least pretence to foretell thunder-a species of capacity of which he has given the most unequivocal evidence. I gave but sixpence for him, which is a groat more than the market-price, though he is in fact, or rather would be, if Leeches were not found in every ditch, an invaluable acquisition.

As the Kitten mentioned in this Letter was probably in her advanced life the Heroine of a

little sportive moral Poem, it may be introduced perhaps not improperly here.

And where secure as Mouse in chink,
She might repose, or sit and think.
I know not where she caught the trick-
Nature perhaps herself had cast her
In such a mould philosophique,
Or else she learn'd it of her master.
Sometimes ascending debonair,
An apple-tree or lofty pear,

Lodg'd with convenience in the fork,
She watch'd the Gardner at his work;
Sometimes her ease and solace sought
In an old empty wat'ring pot,
There wanting nothing, save a fan,
To seem some nymph in her sedan,
Apparell'd in exactest sort,

And ready to be borne to court.

But love of change it seems has place

Not only in our wiser race;

Cats also feel as well as we

That passion's force, and so did she.
Her climbing she began to find
Expos'd her too much to the wind,
And the old utensil of tin
Was cold and comfortless within:
She therefore wish'd instead of those,
Some place of more serene repose,
Where neither cold might come, nor air
Too rudely wanton with her hair.

And

And sought it in the likeliest mode
Within her master's snug abode.

A draw'r, it chanc'd, at bottom lin'd
With linen of the softest kind,
With such as merchants introduce
From India, for the lady's use,
A draw'r impending o'er the rest,
Half open in the top-most chest,
Of depth enough, and none to spare,
Invited her to slumber there.
Puss with delight beyond expression,
Survey'd the scene, and took possession.
Recumbent at her ease ere long,

And lull'd by her own hum-drum song,
She left the cares of life behind,
And slept as she would sleep her last,
When in came, housewifely inclin'd,
The Chambermaid, and shut it fast,
By no malignity impell'd,

But all unconscious whom it held.

Awaken'd by the shock (cried Puss)

"Was ever Cat attended thus!

"The open draw'r was left I see

66

Merely to prove a nest for me,

"For soon as I was well compos'd,

"Then came the maid, and it was clos'd:

" How