Ant Maria said well he cant be sent back now so he sleeps on my bed and i like London it is a kweer place the houses are very big and i like my cussens pretty well they are all gals their nozes are very big i like Polly.
Nurse is quite well so good-bye.
i am your very loving son, REGINALD DACRE.
Though I cannot defend the spelling of the above document, I must say that it does not leave much to be added to the portrait of my cousins.
But it will be more polite to introduce them separately, as they were presented to me.
I heard them, by the bye, before I saw them.

It was whilst I was dressing, the morning after my arrival, that I heard sounds in the room below, which were interpreted by Nurse as being "Miss Maria doing her music." The peculiarity of Miss Maria's music was that after a scramble over the notes, suggestive of some one running to get impetus for a jump, and when the ear waited impatiently for the consummation, Miss Maria baulked her leap, so to speak, and got no farther, and began the scramble again, and stuck once more, and so on.
And as, whilst finding the running passage quite too much for one hand, she struggled on with a different phrase in the other hand at the same time, instead of practising the two hands separately, her chances of final success seemed remote indeed.

Then I heard the performance in peculiar circumstances.

Nurse Bundle had opened my window, and about two minutes after my cousin commenced her practice, an organ-grinder in the street below began his.

The subject of poor Maria's piece knew no completion, as she stuck halfway; but the organ-grinder's melodies only stopped for a touch to the mechanism, and Black-Eyed Susan passed into the Old Hundredth, awkwardly, but with hardly a perceptible pause.