Page:Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne.djvu/104

90

March 21, 1867.

SEE, by your last letter, for which I heartily thank you, that you would not sympathise with me in my sorrow for the desertion of his own work by George Cruikshank, that he may fight in the front of the temperance ranks. But you do not know what work he has left undone, nor how much richer inheritance you might have received from his hand. It was no more his business to etch diagram of drunkenness than it is mine at this moment to be writing these letters against anarchy. It is "the first mild day of March" (high time, I think, that it should be!), and by rights I ought to be out among the budding banks and hedges, outlining sprays of hawthorn and clusters of