[Manchester—Wednesday, 29 August 1866]
Wednesday. Dog day weather, cloudy in the morning a quiet day—the yellow gerardias in full beauty.
Poor Miss Mary quite deaf with her cold and full of sadness and discouragement.
Read Chaucer and Victor Hugo’s sea story. The night was damp which at last deepened into rain which was profoundly still—a contrast to the afternoon when the birds appeared innumerable. As I walked through the woods, the ground, the trees, the bushes, the flowers, seemed each to have been chosen as the birds especial haunt from which they flew with a wild chirp as I approached but the air was still and full of perfume and the sea blue grey like the massed and rifted clouds.
