"Elsie, my poor little sister, is ill. Only a childish ailment, but I have not written for three days, and she has lain, feeble and languid, in my arms, and I have told her stories. We have moved again, and here, thank God! the furniture, and the carpets and the paper do not swear at each other so violently. I say, thank God! with due reverence. I am truly and devoutly grateful for the release from that sense of unrest caused by the twisted red and green arabesques on the floor. Here all is sombre. The walls are a dull shade, the carpet neutral, the furniture the faded brocatelle dedicate to boarding-houses; but it is not so bad. The golden light lies along the floor, and is reflected on my 'Birth of Venus' on the wall. Above my desk is a small shelf of my best-loved books,--loved now; perhaps I shall destroy them next year, having absorbed all their nutriment, even as now, 'I burn all I used to worship. I worship all I used to burn.' Under the bookrack is a copy of Severn's last sketch of Keats, the vanquished, dying head of the slain poet, more brutally killed than the world counts. The eyes are closed and sunken; the mouth, once so prone to kiss, droops pitifully at the corners; the beautiful temples are hollow. Underneath I have written the words of de Vigny, the words as true as death, if as bitter: 'Hope is the greatest of all our follies.' I need no other curb to my mad dreams than this. "It has been cold, so cold to-day. I left Elsie asleep, and went to the office of the ---- Magazine with an article I wrote a month or so ago. The truth is, Elsie should have a doctor, and I have no money to pay him. I was almost sure Mr. ---- would take this. He was out, and I waited a long time in vain, and finally walked back in the wind and blowing dust, chilled to the heart. I wished to write in the afternoon, but I was so beaten with the weather that I threw myself on the bed by Elsie to try to collect my thoughts. It was no use. I found my eyes and mind wandering vaguely about the room. I was staring at the paper frieze of garlanded roses, and the ugly, dingy paper below it of a hideous lilac. What fiend ever suggested to my landlady the combination of crimson roses and purplish paper? How I hate my environments! Poverty and sybaritism go as ill together as roses and purple paper, but I have always been too much given up to the gratification of the eyes and of the senses. How well I remember in my first girlhood, how I used to fill bowls with roses, lilacs and heliotrope, in the country June, and putting beneath my cheek a little pillow, whose crimson silk gave me delight, shut my eyes in my rough, unfinished little room, and the vales of Persia and the scented glades of the tropics were mine to wander through. Yes, a dreamer's Paradise, for I was only sixteen then, and untroubled by any thoughts of Love; yet sometimes Its shadow would enter and vaguely perplex me, a strange shape, waiting always beyond, in the