Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 1A SCHOLAR'S LETTERS TO A YOUNG LADY textit{{Friday, May ?, 1883. We are on the very verge of a grand reception (by the Ashburners) for L, 300 invited. Misery textit{{hates company, and as I have been forced to groan before ? company, villainous company hath been the undoing of me?I do not mean to go ? have not the energy to dress ? should feel lost in the crowd?am as usual tired?have a pile of examinations which ought to be begun upon (but will not today, I textit{{fear)?all these reasons. But since there will be no object in my writing after you have the society of L, ? will there I must seize my last chance, for she goes to you on Monday. I waved triumphantly or vaingloriously, or what not, your last note at her, and she saw the address and subscription, that's all, for I wished her to think you had written deep things to your confessor. . . . We rode into town together in the best of all carriages ? the open street-car ? she to lunch, I to Barnum's. She talked a little about you, but very little did I learn from the gay and sportive L about her sister. To make up for that, she can tell you more than you may care to hear about me: what a hobbler I am, how decrepit in body, in mindcoming out. Then they did not come out by hundreds and thousands in the course of that hot week beginning a fortnight ago: and I shall be glad to think so. Ah, what a short season, with four hot days and four rains, and some hard blows of wind But never were my roses so beautiful. I have had few people to see them and of the few only a few that had a textit{{call to look at roses: good people, textit{{bonnes meres de famille probes, as Mile. Le Clerc said of the women of Cambridge (she added textit{{mais pas un attrait), but, with respect to roses, ignorant, uninspired, or even frivolous. Now if I could h...