with Whatman but take what he has on the shelves. In one thing I think I differ from you a little, i.e., about the joined letters or queer signs: since our book is to be a reprint, not a fac-simile, I do not think that we need reproduce these: indeed I should extend the abbreviations in order to make the book more readable. However I am open to correction on this point. Don't rest too much on my date of Christmas for the type: we seem to be getting on very slowly with it at present, and I have only eleven letters cut yet. I can only hope for the best.
"Yours ever,
"William Morris."
By the middle of October "the type is getting on: I have all the lower case letters (26), also I have been designing ornamental letters, rather good I think." His excitement over the work was so great that for once he left Kelmscott, when autumn ended, with little regret. "We are coming to London to-day," he writes from there on the 16th of October. "The weather has been very good; our best day was Monday, when I hear you had a fog; it was a miracle of a day here: the sort of day when you really can do nothing but stand and stare at it. I am not sorry to come to town. I want to cease from being bumbled up and down. I want to work hard at my easy work."
The breaking up of the Socialist League and the constitution of the Hammersmith Socialist Society, though it took up a measure of his time for the next six weeks in London, hardly disturbed him materially, and did not check the progress of his other work. By the end of the year all but two of the punches for the type, both upper and lower case, were completed, and
