Dear Theo,

Bravo, Theo. Your appreciation of that girl in “Adam Bede” is very good. That landscape in which the fallow, sandy path runs over the hill to the village, with its clay or whitewashed cottages, with moss-grown roofs, and here and there a black thornbush, on either side of the brown heath, and a gloomy sky over it, with a narrow white streak at the horizon - it is out of Michel.

But there is a still purer and nobler sentiment in it than in Michel. Today I enclose, in the box we send, the little book containing poetry I spoke of. Also “Jesus” by Renan and “Joan of Arc” by Michelet and also a portrait of Corot from the “London News,” which hangs in my room too.

I do not think you have any immediate chance of being transferred to the house in London.

Don't regret that your life is too easy, mine is rather easy too; I think that life is pretty long and that the time will arrive soon enough in which “another shall gird thee and carry thee where thou wouldst not.”

Adieu, remember me to all the friends. With a firm handshake,

Vincent