1837-38. BIRTH OF A PUN. 101 



made roomy at the bends. . . .' My dear brother, we are most 

 heartily delighted at your success, in eveiy way so far superior 

 to what we could have expected, and I do congratulate you most 

 sincerely, and with a lightness of heart which I have not known 

 since you left, and which is my only apology for the nonsense I 

 may write or have written. . . . Let us return to more trivial 

 things, and first to the exploits of others, and then of myself ; for 

 I am going in my yepistles to cater from all sources for news for 

 you. Well, on the sixth, my friend John Niven was safely de- 

 livered of a right good pun, and both child and parent are doing 

 very well, and as I was present at the accouchement, you may 

 feel interested in the detail of facts. I was dining with his 

 uncle, who told us a grave, sober piece of nonsense, believed by 

 him, however, about the Countess of Mar having had a number 

 of children born blind, a mischance which no one could under- 

 stand or explain, till an old spaewife, who called at the door, 

 referred it to a great stone statue of some heathen god standing 

 in the park, which the Countess greatly admired, and whose 

 great convex pupilless eye-balls the old crone said were the 

 sympathetic cause of the children's blindness. The statue 

 was removed, and the next child could see. Now, said 

 the uncle, turning to us, what can you doctors say to that? 

 ' Why/ says John, gravely pulling up the corners of his mouth, 

 'there is no mystery in it at all; the children were stone 

 blind/" 



" ISth October 1837. 



" MY DEAR DANIEL, Though you can scarcely have digested 

 the contents of my last epistle to you, I make no excuse for 

 again writing, the more so that I forgot a great many things 

 in my last, which I hope to be able, like Campbell, to ' squeeze 

 into ' this ; and, in addition, I have been mainly prompted to 

 write at this short interval that I might tell you what, if left 

 for a longer time untold, might from passing occurrences 

 become historical events, and pass out of the jurisdiction of the 

 letter-writer. . . . 



" Jessie has been rather complaining for a few days back, and 

 yesterday became so feverish that we called in the doctor. It 



