to Mrs. Thomas Stevenson

Cockfield Rectory, Sudbury, Suffolk,
Tuesday, July 28, 1873.

MY DEAR MOTHER,—I am too happy to be much of a correspondent.  Yesterday we were away to Melford and Lavenham, both exceptionally placid, beautiful old English towns.  Melford scattered all round a big green, with an Elizabethan Hall and Park, great screens of trees that seem twice as high as trees should seem, and everything else like what ought to be in a novel, and what one never expects to see in reality, made me cry out how good we were to live in Scotland, for the many hundredth time.  I cannot get over my astonishment—indeed, it increases every day—at the hopeless gulf that there is between England and Scotland, and English and Scotch.  Nothing is the same; and I feel as strange and outlandish here as I do in France or Germany.  Everything by the wayside, in the houses, or about the people, strikes me with an unexpected unfamiliarity: I walk among surprises, for just where you think you have them, something wrong turns up.

I got a little Law read yesterday, and some German this morning, but on the whole there are too many amusements going for much work; as for correspondence, I have neither heart nor time for it to-day.

R. L. S.