Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. It has seemed to me possible that there might be a welcome for this volume of letters from my cousin to his mother: partly because of the peculiar sense of personal friendship for John Ayscough continually testified by his readers, by readers who have never met him, and (living far from England) probably never will meet him; and partly because all who are his readers must know by how rare a bond of love and devotion he and his mother were united.

The letters contained in this volume were the last he ever did write to her, and they were written during his absence on Active Service in France and Flanders: two circumstances which I have thought might give them a special interest. For five and twenty years Ayscough's mother had been in every sense dependent upon her son: for many years she had hardly suffered him to leave her, even on the briefest absence: she was eighty-five years old and in most precarious health. His departure for the front was a blow from which she never recovered: the blow which did in fact bring her long life to its end. Knowing well how this almost must be, it was her son's one preoccupation to bridge that absence as much as was simply possible by unfailing frequency of letters, and further, by seldom in those letters allowing her to picture him as in danger or discomfort. He wanted, if he could, to make her imagine him as enjoying a complete change, full of interest, and having no drawback but the separation from herself that it involved.

It has seemed to me possible that there might be a welcome for this volume of letters from my cousin to his mother: partly because of the peculiar sense of personal friendship for John Ayscough continually testified by his readers, by readers who have never met him, and (living far from England) probably never will meet him; and partly because all who are his readers must know by how rare a bond of love and devotion he and his mother were united.The letters contained in this volume were the last he ever did write to her, and they were written during his absence on Active Service in France and Flanders: two circumstances which I have thought might give them a special interest. For five and twenty years Ayscough's mother had been in every sense dependent upon her son: for many years she had hardly suffered him to leave her, even on the briefest absence: she was eighty-five years old and in most precarious health. His departure for the front was a blow from which she never recovered: the blow which did in fact bring her long life to its end. Knowing well how this almost must be, it was her son's one preoccupation to bridge that absence as much as was simply possible by unfailing frequency of letters, and further, by seldom in those letters allowing her to picture him as in danger or discomfort. He wanted, if he could, to make her imagine him as enjoying a complete change, full of interest, and having no drawback but the separation from herself that it involved.