MS University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign: Letter 10.
My dear Mrs Blackburn,
It is very pleasant to hear from you again! Someone ought to collect versions of Father Isams[?] and Sister Katieaia[?] (as she was in my time) Our school children have been seeing [sic] playing at them in Church. I should not have understood but my mother and her half sister had played at it in their childhood without understanding it. A few years ago one of my cousins saw another – a freavert[?]; amusing his children with this game and much diverted, asked if he knew what it meant. It is played in France too. A few years ago there was an article in some magazine on the behaviour of French children in the Tuileries gardens – where this game was mentioned as an instance of parodying religious rights [sic]. To which Marguerite de Witt (Guizot’s grand daughter) wrote a rejoinder saying she had known it all her life, and only thought it an excuse for children’s kisses – wonder where else it prevails.
I have led a very home life as usual – Some twelve years ago a crippled and invalid sister of my brother’s wife came to live with me, and as she has grown worse, it has ended in my staying more at at [sic] home. She is now entirely confined to bed, and can only use her left hand- and so it has been for more than a year, though she is a most vigorous minded person, reads everything with keen interest, and is full of excitement and trouble about this fearful affair in Egypt.2 I am glad we are still left a fragment of hope today for Gordon- though if it were for anyone else I should have none, but his has hitherto been a charmed life- it is like that clever article in Blackwood where they send out the Life boat too late
Yours sincerely
C M Yonge