/# Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857. #/
/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 16th, 1914. */
Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well, I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert, the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has happened--your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder. It represents indeed the _type_, perfect case, with nothing to be taken from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely _didn't_ squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it, through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago) when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents, and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer afternoon--a boy of 14--in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussée where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its--the case's--perfect beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this report indeed--and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a portentous young person, with the _conditions_ of the whole thing throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age--I would give so much for a veracious portrait of her _then_ face. To all of which absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to _dream_, please, of responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully,