Mrs Daffodil Takes a Brief Holiday While the Family is at Wimbledon

Mr and Mrs Washington, c. 1908, wish you the happiest of Independence Days.

Mrs Daffodil’s duties at the Hall are lightened this week-end by His Lordship, family, and guests having taken a house at Wimbledon for the duration of the lawn-tennis competition. They will return, full of strawberries and cream and with the younger set fashionably browned from the sun, on Monday. His Lordship kindly offered to purchase a ticket so Mrs Daffodil could view the contest, but she declined with thanks. If she wished to watch brutish young Scots leaping and hurling themselves about on immaculately tended lawns to the accompaniment of horrid imprecations, she could supervise the gardeners.

Mrs Daffodil will not be idle, however, and is taking a brief holiday from this forum to  prepare for their return and to read some improving book, perhaps something on poisons and how they may be administered in novel ways rather than in the same tiresome, arsenic-laden chocolates. She will share the fruit of her knowledge when she returns Wednesday next.

Mrs Daffodil wishes all of her American readers a very happy Independence Day. She will keep her reservations about the Revolution to herself.