Autograph letter signed : London, to Dr. Baldwin, 1893 Dec. 31.

Thanking him for the flowers he sent; "I should have written to you today even had I not received lovely flowers from you yesterday - in perfect bloom and condition; for I meant on this ragged edge of the old year to give you a sign of affectionate remembrance. Your own tokens, lighting up with their Italian sweetness my dusky London morning give me a double motive for thanking you. Please believe that the generous advent of the roses touched and delighted me. They were as fresh as girlish beauty. I have been worried about you ever since I saw [illegible] in the Times: this other a.m. the ugly, the most painful announcement of Maquay and Hooker's failure. I thought of many things & many people - but my thoughts jumped first to you, conjuring up uncomfortable possibilities. I should have instantly written to you, had it not been for the material oppressions and preoccupations that the year's end brings. I hope with all my heart that you are not 'hit' by the disaster in any grave degree. I know you made much use of them financially - but I take for granted with a due sense of the realities of the case. I try to think that your boxes of roses are a sign of a free mind & an undiminished purse; but I am not altogether easy, for I know your friendly impulse, my dear Baldwin, would not be wanting even were you bothered & compromised. At any rate I put your situation at the best until I hear that you have been incommoded. How many people in Florence and Rome, must have been! And I have just been writing to that graceful Mme. Wagnière, to tell her I feel for her misfortunes. I'm afraid you all have to be brave together. That's easier, however, than alone. Perhaps you, individually, are not even enough alone - overwhelmed as I always think of you with the bodies and souls, the hopes and fears, of others. I pray, at any rate, that there be no harm in your house - nor in your still more intimate interior. I trust the discomforts and dangers of Italy don't mean any great worry for yourself, who are so little responsible for them. May the coming year have, at any rate, nothing but good to show you! It will show you me, I fondly calculate; for good or for ill. My hopes are so set on spending the spring in Italy that I shall literally break my heart if I don't. I believe myself to be decently well, if it be not too presumptuous a speech. If it be, I accompany it with the most cringing deprecations."