Dearest Father

It is very good of you to write to me & I shall always keep your letter.² I could not have had one which was more sweet to me. I’m sure I often think if our marriage can be half or $\frac{2}{3}$^rds as perfect as yours, Richard³ & I shall be very happy. I’m not Mother—but still it ought to be a great help to have a perfect model & I shall always keep her clear image before me.

Dear dear Father words seem so dry & poor & won’t say what I feel—without words you will know how precious your letter is to me.

I had an access of tire last night & wrote a horrid dry bones in answer to Bessy⁴—today—thank the pigs it has rained & I thought it allowable to take a long sup of bed—fleas, too, caught in the ein spanner⁵ kept me tearing my little flesh off my bones till 2.30 ^AM & so I felt I had earned a little rest in the A.M. It is quite a pleasure to have your breakfast in bed abroad. they bring it you up so nice & complete. The washerwoman did come at 7.30 & I succeeded in fighting her pretty successfully—in so far that she promised to wash tho’ not to iron. I, like a stupid, forgot to make her starch as well—so at 11.30 sent off R. well armed with the words “gesteifen”.⁶ He found 6 washerwomen to be faced & his german was such that they each in turn had to retire to their tubs to laugh—his “warum laughen Sie?”⁷ couldn’t have helped matters.

We’ve been a sweet little soaky soaky walk of about a mile & $\frac{1}{2}$ thro’ beech woods & little meadows with cows & all alpine charms to a grand set of precipices going sheer down into the bluey greeny lake below & all the mountains round looking solemn & mysterious in their coats of mist. Tis a lovely place & apparently cheap so that I’ve been calculating that however hard up we are in future times, we shall be able to take a Cook’s ticket for £6 & live here for about £4 a week so that this wont be my last tour—£30 we will always be able to scratch up. There are very respectable people here of the bourgeois class—an old englishman who shouts “hi”! at the waiter when his wife informs him that the cabbage he has let pass is good. She the wife was indignant at the waiters impertinent curiosity in asking whether she would have tea or coffee at night. Such is life! A meal is approaching & it is getting cold & damp in this open balcony where we are sitting, cleaned up after our wet walk.

Goodbye dearest Father | your ever affect dau^t | H. E. L.

Your letter was forwarded. R. says I have taken away his character— He knows a good deal of sound waiter & chambermaid german but not up to washerwoman pitch.