Your old friend and schoolfellow, RICHARD PUGSLEY.
When you come, bring us a ’bacco-pipe to load the gun with. If you don’t come, it can come by the waggon. Our Public House is three mile off, and when you’ve walked there it’s out of everything. Yours, &c.,
No. III.--_From Miss_ ANASTASIA PUGSLEY, _to Miss_ JEMIMA MOGGRIDGE, _at Gregory House Establishment for Young Ladies, Mile End_.
Deeply solicitous to gratify sensibility, by sympathising with our fortuitous elevation, I seize the epistolary implements to inform you, that, by the testamentary disposition of a remote branch of consanguinity, our tutelary residence is removed from the metropolitan horizon to a pastoral district and its congenial pursuits. In futurity I shall be more pertinaciously superstitious in the astrological revelations of human destiny. You remember the mysterious gipsy at Hornsey Wood?--Well, the eventful fortune she obscurely intimated, though couched in vague terms, has come to pass in minutest particulars; for I perceive perspicuously, that it predicted that papa should sell off his boot and shoe business at 133, Barbican, to Clack and Son, of 144, Hatton Garden, and that we should retire, in a station of affluence, to Middlefen Hall, in Lincolnshire, by bequest of our great-great maternal uncle, Pollexfen Goldsworthy Wrigglesworth, Esq., who deceased suddenly of apoplexy at Wisbeach Market, in the ninety-third year of his venerable and lamented age.
At the risk of tedium, I will attempt a cursory delineation of our rural paradise, altho’ I feel it would be morally arduous, to give any idea of the romantic scenery of the Lincolnshire Fens. Conceive, as far as the visual organ expands, an immense sequestered level, abundantly irrigated with minute rivulets, and studded with tufted oaks, whilst more than a hundred windmills diversify the prospect and give a revolving animation to the scene. As for our own gardens and grounds, they are a perfect Vauxhall--excepting, of course, the rotunda, the orchestra, the company, the variegated lamps, the fire-works, and those very lofty trees. But I trust my dear Jemima will supersede topography by ocular inspection; and in the interim I send for acceptance a graphical view of the locality, shaded in Indian ink, which will suffice to convey an idea of the terrestrial verdure and celestial azure we enjoy, in lieu of the sable exhalations and architectural nigritude of the metropolis.