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282 enough, and though it has a sadness about it, which is not gloom but the melancholy born of beauty I suppose, it is very stimulating to the imagination. I am going down there on Saturday, where I expect to enjoy making the acquaintance again of the little pony that carried me in my six weeks' ride, the bravest and best tempered of little beasts: you should have seen him picking his way in one of those dismal bogs, where if you sneeze, the earth, or rather the roots of the grass, trembles violently: they say, however, that the Icelandic ponies get lazy among the fat pastures and soft air of England—small blame to them."

He had already been down to Kelmscott, where his family, with Rossetti, had been living during his Iceland voyage. On the 23rd of September he went there again, stopping on the way at Oxford to buy a boat for the new house, and driving over from Oxford up the beautiful autumnal Thames valley. Early in October the long summer came at last to an end. Mouse, the pony, was left at Kelmscott, where he grew fat and lazy, and was much loved by the children. The little biography which one of them gives me, five and twenty years after, makes a pretty picture of that peaceful home.

"He was gentle and quiet, though not without slyness: for I remember there was one gate-post against which, when I went out for a ride, he used often to try to rub me off his broad back. I'm ashamed for my horsemanship to think how often the rogue had his way. Father used to ride him about the country a good bit at first. Then I jogged about with him, and he used to be put to a little basket-carriage, and go meandering along in a meditative way. He got enormously fat on our coarse thick plentiful English grass, with little to do; and I used to imagine him