MS Plymouth and West Devon Area Record Office Ac 1092/29

My dear Augusta

I don’t know how it is but there never seems to be room in the Packet. I cannot get in my own Cameos, nor finish up the Three Brides as I meant to have done by two chapters at a time. When I began the York & L Rose I thought both it and Dt Cecil would end at Midsummer, and now I find that they will last on into next year. Then the new printer will not let me put things in type and keep them till I can find a good niche, but only prints just when will make one number so that I do not get my way. I hope as the Winter Story will finish I shall have a little more room after December, but to get in your paper has really been impossible hitherto. The Beginnings of Church history are the short chapters that I have had in the now collapsed Monthly Paper finished up on to the present time, for there are so many Church histories stopping with the three first centuries. The Stories are only the old ones like the Xmas Mummers &c reprinted in one volume. My Young Alcides is a sort of Modern story built on the lines of the Labours of Hercules. I have had to finish it up to be a Christmas story and have been so hurried as to have no time for anything else in the way of writing for the last fortnight but I sent off his preface and title page today and must bring up arrears

Ones heart aches to think of Puslinch but I think those times of worry and unhappiness are not constant, and that this probably was the effect of Duke being obliged to go instead of choosing a good time as he did in the summer I think the brain always was an excitable one and that anxiety has grown on him with the inability to control it, but one certainly does dread extreme old age. I do not know what day Miss Finlaison’s break up is to be. They are all in a state of excitement about a concert which is to come off this week in the girls’ school room, two days of it, between the choir, Frances, Mrs Bateman and the governesses. I wonder whether even to the musical the pleasure or the worry predominates, though to be sure the Managers and performers have all the worry to themselves. Gertrude is beginning the winter astonishingly well, and is taking quite a start of strength though I do not suppose she will go out again

I hope John’s cold is better and that it will not be the beginning of such a series as you had last winter

your most affectionate
C M Yonge