“I have just got your note and am glad you like the O’Ds., but the best of the batch are not here, as I am sure you will think,--‘Forfeited Pledges’ and ‘What to do with it’ especially. I cannot throw off my cough, and as I don’t sleep at night I do nothing but sleep all day, and this disposition of my time is little favourable to habits of industry. “I suppose you are right. Syd’s energy would have carried me off to Croatia if possible. Do you remember the story of the Irish priest telling the peasant that whenever he--the peasant aforesaid--went into a ‘shebeen’ to drink, his guardian angel stood weeping at the door. ‘Begorra,’ said Pat, ‘I don’t wonder but if he had sixpence he’d be in too.’ It is really the want of the sixpence makes me a guardian angel. “The weather is intensely hot here just now, and all out-of-door life impossible till evening, and for my own part I never wander beyond the walls of my own garden, which, fortunately for me, is very pretty and shady too. Very little companionship would reconcile me to the place, but there’s positively none. It was this sort of solitude, begetting a species of brooding, that broke down my poor brother in an Irish parish; and sometimes I dread the depression for myself. It costs me such an effort to do anything.” _To Mr John Blackwood_ “Trieste, _July_ 10, 1869. “You have read of some ships having crossed the Atlantic with eight feet of water in the hold, bulwarks staved in, sails in tatters, the whole only kept afloat by the incessant labour of crew and passengers at the pumps; and such is pretty much my condition, and must, I believe, continue to be for the rest of my voyage here, and what is perhaps worst of all is, in this same lamentable state I must still solicit freight and cargo, ask to be ‘chartered,’ and pledge myself to be seaworthy and insurable. “Well, I can only say, ‘I’ll not humbug you.’ You shall see the craft in all its rottenness, and not embark a bale on board of me without knowing how frail is the hope you trust to. Having said this much of warning (not that you need warning, for no man better knows the value of what he takes or rejects), I have now another confession to make. I have begun my new story, which I call ‘Lord Kilgobbin,’ which will be essentially Irish, and for which, if I live and thrive, I mean to take a look at Ireland about May next. “I have made such an opening--such as all here are delighted with, and I myself think not so bad. I shall be ready if you like to begin in April, and shall be able to send you No. 1 before the present month is out. “I had gout on me all the time I was writing the ‘Dodds,’ and I have a theory that if it does not utterly floor me it sharpens me. What debilitates occasionally stimulates, just as cutting a ship’s timbers will give a knot to her speed.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, July 12,1869.