“Many thanks for your hitherto unacknowledged ‘Anecdotes.’ Now for one of mine—I am going to be married, and have been engaged this month. It is a long story, and therefore, I won’t tell it,—an old and (though I did not know it till lately) a mutual attachment. The very sad life I have led since I was your pupil must partly account for the offs and ons in this now to be arranged business. We are only waiting for the lawyers and settlements, &c., and next week, or the week after, I shall go down to Seaham in the new character of a regular suitor for a wife of mine own.
“I hope Hodgson is in a fair way on the same voyage—I saw him and his idol at Hastings. I wish he would be married at the same time. I should like to make a party,—like people electrified in a row, by (or rather through) the same chain, holding one another’s hands, and all feeling the shock at once. I have not yet apprized him of this. He makes such a serious matter of all these things, and is so ‘melancholy and gentlemanlike,’ that it is quite overcoming to us choice spirits.
They say one shouldn’t be married in a black coat. I won’t have a blue one,—that’s flat. I hate it.
