“My Best Love, . . .—I have passed few pleasanter
days in my life than I passed yesterday. After some debate with myself, and
finding that there was no means of public conveyance, I resolved to walk to
Felpham (between seven and eight miles). The weather was very hot (the
‘literary hermit’ [Hayley]
insisted on receiving me at noon), yet, to my astonishment, I was not at all
fatigued. The literary hermit I dismiss in one word.—I do not like him. His
wife, however, seems a pleasant, unaffected, animated girl (he swears he
himself is only sixty-five); and his house is quite a toy. He has erected a
turret on the top, with a corridor over that, for the sake of the prospect, and
to this corridor he climbs at least once every day by a ladder, which can only
be descended by crawling backwards, and which, being on the top of the house in
the open air, looked to me frightful, but I escaped without breaking either my
neck or my leg. Pictures, drawings, splendid books, and splendid bindings adorn
every room in the house,
| A LITERARY HERMIT. | 189 |
“I say this in the sobriety of my deliberate judgment, and without a spice of resentment, for the moment I quitted his babyhouse my happiness began. I went to Bognor, I inhaled the lifegiving breezes of the sea, which I think, were I expiring with the imbecility of old age, would make me young again. Bognor is a sweet place. Why is it so? Merely because it is on the open beach of the sea, and is scattered over with neat little houses for the opulent, built for the purposes of health and recreation. Sarah Pink, the generous landlady of the hotel, gave me that dinner. which the frozen-hearted Hayley refused. . . . She completed all her other kindnesses by refusing me a chaise to bring me back to Chichester last night, so that I was compelled to spend till eleven at night—the beautiful, serene, moonlight evening of one of the most beautiful days I ever saw, on the open shore, and only quitted the beach to repair to my bed. . . . I have got my pencil-case. It was in the coat pocket where Betsey swore it was not. . . . Ever and ever yours,
