"By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world."
_Greno House, Grenoside, Sheffield._ Aug. 3, 1880.
_À propos_ of my affairs ... next year we might do something with some of my "small gems." Don't _you_ like "Aldegunda" (Blind Man and Talking Dog)? D. does so much. Do you like the "Kyrkegrim turned Preacher," "Ladders to Heaven," and "Dandelion Clocks"?...
... As you know, these _little_ things are the chief favourites with my more educated friends, whose kindness consoles me for the much labour I spend on so few words (The "Kyrkegrim turned Preacher" was "in hand" two years!!!), and I think their only chance would be to be so dressed and presented as to specially and downrightly appeal to those who would value the Art of the Illustrator, and perhaps recognize the refinement of labour with which the letter-press has been ground down, and clipped, and condensed, and selected--till, as it would appear to the larger buying-public, there is _wonderfully little left you for your money_!!...
Poor old Cruikshank! How well--and willingly--he would have done "Kyrkegrim turned Preacher." He said, when he read my things, "the Fairies came and danced to him"--which pleased me much.
Yesterday I pulled myself together and wrote straight to the printers, to the effect that the suffering the erratic and careless printing of "We and the World" cost me was such that I was obliged to protest against X. and Sons economizing by using boys and untrained incapables to print (printing from print being easier, and therefore adapted for teaching the young P.D. how to set up type), pointing out one sentence in which (clear type in _A.J.M._) the words "insist on guiding my fate by lines of their own ruling" was printed to the effect that they wouldn't insist on _gilding_ my _faith_, etc., _their_ being changed to _there_. All of which the _reader_ had overlooked--to concern himself with my Irish brogue--and certain _reiterations of words_ which he mortally hates, and which I regard the chastened use of, as like that of the _plural of excellence_ in Hebrew!
(He would have put that demoniacal mark [symbol: checkmark] against one of the summers in "All the fragrance of summer when summer was gone"!!!)