islands three hundred years hence? We should not understand them nor they us. Avaunt, therefore, all legendary immortalities, and let us be content, Ross, to be remembered by our friends, and, perhaps, to have our names passed on by disciples to another generation! A fair and natural immortality this is; let us share it together. Our bark lies in the harbour: you tell me the spars are sound, and the seams have been caulked; the bark, you say, is seaworthy and will outlive any of the little storms that she may meet on the voyage--a better craft is not to be found in my little fleet. You said yesterevening across the hearthrug, '_Esther Waters_ speaks out of a deeper appreciation of life;' but you added: 'In _A Mummer's Wife_ there is a youthful imagination and a young man's exuberance on coming into his own for the first time, and this is a quality--'No doubt it is a quality, Ross; but what kind of quality? You did not finish your sentence, or I have forgotten it. Let me finish it for you--'that outweighs all other qualities' But does it? I am interpreting you badly. You would not commit yourself to so crude an opinion, and I am prepared to believe that I did not catch the words as they fell from your lips. All I can recall for certain of the pleasant moment when, you were considering which of my works you liked the best are stray words that may be arranged here into a sentence which, though it does not represent your critical judgments accurately, may be accepted by you. You said your thoughts went more frequently to _A Mummer's Wife_ than to _Esther Waters_; and I am almost sure something was said about the earlier book being a more spontaneous issue of the imagination, and that the wandering life of the mummers gives an old-world, adventurous air to the book, reminding you of _The Golden Ass_--a book I read last year, and found in it so many remembrances of myself that I fell to thinking it was a book I might have written had I lived two thousand years ago. Who can say he has not lived before, and is it not as important to believe we lived herebefore as it is to believe we are going to live hereafter? If I had lived herebefore, Jupiter knows what I should have written, but it would not have been _Esther Waters_: more likely a book like _A Mummer's Wife_--a band of jugglers and acrobats travelling from town to town. As I write these lines an antique story rises up in my mind, a recollection of one of my lost works or an instantaneous reading of Apuleius into _A Mummers Wife_--which? G.M. A MUMMER'S WIFE I