74 Gloucester Place: December 7, 1836.

My dearest Mrs. Martin,--Indeed I have long felt the need of writing
to you (I mean the need to myself), and although so many weeks and
even months have passed away in silence, they have not done so in lack
of affection and thought.

I had wished very much to have been able to tell you in this letter
where we had taken our house, or where we were going to take it. We
remain, however, in our usual state of conscious ignorance, although
there is a good deal of talking and walking about a house in Wimpole
Street--which, between ourselves, I am not very anxious to live in,
on account of the gloominesses of that street, and of that part of the
street, whose walls look so much like Newgate's turned inside out. I
would rather go on, in my old way, inhabiting castles in the air than
that particular house. Nevertheless, if it _is_ decided upon, I dare
say I shall contrive to be satisfied with it, and sleep and wake very
much as I should in any other. It will certainly be a point gained
to be settled somewhere, and I do so long to sit in my own
armchair--strange as it will look out of my own room--and to read from
my own books.... For our own particular parts, our healths continue
good--none of us, I think, the worse for fog or wind. As to wind, we
were almost elevated into the prerogative of _pigs_ in the late storm.
We could almost _see_ it, and the feeling it might have been fatal to
us. Bro and I were moralising about shipwrecks, in the dining-room,
when down came the chimney through the skylight into the entrance
passage. You may imagine the crashing effect of the bricks bounding
from the staircase downwards, breaking the stone steps in the process,
in addition to the falling in of twenty-four large panes of glass,
frames and all. We were terrified out of all propriety, and there has