But enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... I must catch my post. I haven't sounded you for the least news of your own--it being needless to tell you that I hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. I go on taking immense comfort in the "Second Home," as I beg your pardon for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if I had invented it. I am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on Xmas evening all alone: I have no one in the house, I never dine out here under _any_ colour (there are to be found people who do!) and I have been deaf to the syren voice of Paris, and to other gregarious pressure. But I wish you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear Norris, all faithfully and fondly,
/# H.J. had inadvertently addressed the preceding letter to 'E. W. Norris Esq.' #/
It came over me in the oddest way, weirdly and dimly, as I lay soaking in my hot bath an hour ago, that my jaded and inadvertent hand (I have written so many letters in so few days, and you see the effect on everyone doubtless but your own impeccably fingered self) superscribed my Xmas envelope with the monstrous collocation "E.W."! The effect has been probably to make you think the letter a circular and chuck it into the fire--or, if you _have_ opened it, to convince you that my handsome picture of my "health" is true--if true at all--of my digestion and other vulgar parts, at the expense of my brain. Clearly you must believe me in distinct cerebral decline. Yet I'm not, I am only--or was--in a state of purely and momentarily _manual_ muddle. But the curious and interesting thing is: Why, suddenly, as I lay this cold morning agreeably _steaming_, did the vision of the hind-part-before order come straight at me out of the vapours, after three or four days, when I didn't know I was thinking of you?
Well, it only shows how much you are, my dear Norris, in the thoughts of yours remorsefully,
P.S. I hope, now, I _did_ do it after all!
/# H.J. had enjoyed the hospitality of these friends at Philadelphia, during his last visit to America. #/