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Elderfield
April 14th [?1899]

MS West Devon Area Record Office Ac 1092/22

My dear Mary
We had two plants of purple periwinkle once in the old shrubbery part of the garden. It disappeared, and I tried to introduce it here from Dogmersfield, where there was plenty, but it did not live. Tell Jenny the bar is a line or stripe going horizontally all across the shield [diagram] The wreath is supposed to be the folds or fastening on the top of the helmet on which the crest is fixed and often it is made to bend a little to follow the shape of the head [diagram] 1

I never heard that the livery was bound to follow it and I don’t think old George Smith had any red in his. Perhaps Miss Duke brought it in with the blue, but then it would have been blue and white2

George was in the Matabele war, I believe his fort was beyond Bulawayo, but he found that the police are disbanded, rode to Salisbury to see Sir Richard Martin who promised to find him employment if he came out again. 3 That was on Christmas Eve, when he swam a river and had to lie in bed till his clothes were dried. After that he had a fever in a Portuguese hospital very dirty and where nothing could be done for you without pay, not even anything to eat.

[part of letter removed with signature]

next morning

Fraulein Marie Heller
Schäpers Strasse
Berlin

Miss Finlaison knows that this is a very good person, a friend of Fanny Pattesons who wants several English to teach for an hour a day, to pay £25 as premium but to be at no further expense.

You don’t say where Charlotte is going I suppose

[rest of letter missing with signature]

1The discussion relates to the Yonge of Puslinch coat of arms which is ‘Or six ogresses in fesse between three lions saliant gules’.
2Elizabeth Duke (b.1720) married (1746) John Yonge (d. 1767) of Puslinch, and their heirs quartered the attractive blue and silver Duke arms (‘Per fesse argent and azure three chaplets counterchanged’).
3Endorsed in another hand ‘he is come home for a time, he joined the Mounted Police’, which suggests that the writer thought he was still alive.

Cite this letter


The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge(1823-1901) edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske.

URL to this Letter is: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/yonge/3404/to-mary-yonge-5

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