"I trust I shall not intrude on Mr. Ruskin's patience if I now say something by way of thankfulness for what I have received from your works. [16] I know not certainly if this will ever reach you. If it does, it may in some small way gladden you to know that I owe to your teaching almost all the good I have thus attained. A large portion of my life has been spent at sea, and in roaming in Mexico, Central and South America, and in the Malaysian and Polynesian Islands. I have been a sailor before and abaft the mast. Years ago I found on a remote island of the Pacific the 'Modern Painters'; after them the 'Seven Lamps of Architecture'; and finally your complete works. Ignorant and uncultivated, I began earnestly to follow certain of your teachings. I read most of the books you recommended, simply because you seemed to be my teacher; and so in the course of these years I have come to believe in you about as faithfully as one man ever believes in another. From having no fixed object in life I have finally found that I have something to do, and will ultimately, I trust, have something to say about sea-life, something that has not, I think, hitherto been said--if God ever permits me the necessary leisure from hard railway work, the most hopeless and depressing of all work I have hitherto done. "Your most thankful servant, ----" With the account given in the first part of this letter of the results of mechanical agriculture in California, you shall now compare a little sketch by Marmontel of the peasant life, not mechanical, in his own province. It is given, altering only the name of the river, in the "Contes Moraux," in the story, professing to continue that of Moliére's 'Misanthrope':