We breakfast at nine, and receive nobody till past four.

This will all prove to you two things, dearest friend--first (I hope) that I'm pardonable for making you wait a few days longer than should have been, and secondly that I'm tolerably well.
Yes, indeed.

Since our arrival in this house, after just the first, when there was some frost, we have had such a miraculous mildness under the name of winter, that I rallied as a matter of course, and for the last month there has been no return of the spitting of blood, and no extravagance of cough.

I have persisted with cod's liver oil, and I look by no means ill, people assure me, and so I may assure _you_.

But I am not very strong, and was a good deal tired after a two hours' drive which I ventured on a week ago in the Bois de Boulogne.