MY DARLING WIFIE,--When I received your dear letter to-day I had just time to send you a few hasty lines in acknowledgment; now when everything is quiet and with your own sweet face before me I can give my thoughts up entirely to my Queen, and talk to you almost as well as if you were in my arms. It seems to me a long, long time since our hasty good-bye, although the first three weeks of my present life--which term will have been completed to-morrow morning--has seemed only a moment. I often feel very sad when I think of poor, unhappy Katie waiting for her husband who does not come any longer as he used to come, but who will come again to her and will not again leave her. I am trying to make arrangements that my own Queenie may come to me this time. I shall ask my ruler here if I may see my cousin, "Mrs. Bligh, who is coming from England to see me," in his office, and with only himself present. After all, darling, the only way in which I could have escaped being here would have been by going to America, and then I could not have seen you at all, and I know I should not have been so happy or so comfortable in America as here, and, besides, I should have been beset by so many dangers there. I admire supremely my life of ease, laziness, absence of care and responsibility here. My only trouble is about your health and happiness and this has been my only trouble from the first. Queenie, then, will see that she also must try not to be so unhappy, especially as her husband's love is becoming stronger and more intense every hour and every day. You will be anxious to know what my short illness was about. It was of a very unromantic kind--not the heart, but the stomach. I had not much appetite for some days, and was tempted by a turkey to eat too much, thence very severe indigestion and considerable pain for about an hour. However "our doctor," by means of mustard and chlorodyne, got me all right again, and my appetite is now as good as ever. In fact, I have gotten over very quickly the "mal du prison" {127} which comes on everybody sooner or later more or less severely. One of the men in this quarter who has been here for nearly nine months, poor fellow, looks after me as if he was my--brother, I was going to say, but I will substitute Mary.[1] He makes me a soda and lemon in the morning, and then gives me my breakfast. At dinner he takes care that I get all the nicest bits and concocts the most perfect black coffee in a "Kaffee Kanne" out of berries, which he roasts and grinds fresh each day. Finally, in the evening, just before we are separated for the night, he brews me a steaming tumbler of hot whisky. He has marked all my clothes for me also, and sees that the washerwoman does not rob me. Don't you begin to feel quite jealous?