I play schoolmaster--How they have turned the Latin grammar inside out!--and I miss my Rule of Three. In a Spanish Census paper I for once made myself "doctor iuris": Glasgow allows me to say "utriusque." I added to the population capable of reading and writing no less than five names--for our trilingual Switzer was to be included--and this will seriously affect Canarian statistics. But I like this illiterate folk. TO HENRY JACKSON. CASA PEÑATE, MONTE, LAS PALMAS. _18 Feb. 1900._ It is downright wickedly pleasant here. By here I do not mean in Las Palmas--which stinketh--but some seven miles out of it and some 1300 feet above it, in a "finca" that we were lucky enough to hire: that is something between a farm house and a villa. The Spaniard of the middle class is a town-loving animal. He likes to have up country a house to which he can go for six weeks or so in the year and where he keeps a major domo (= bailiff) who supplies the town house with country produce. Such a finca we hired for £1 a week, and there we live very comfortably and very cheaply among vines and oranges and so forth. Life here would have been impossible if my wife had not acquired the Spanish, or rather the Canario, tongue with wonderful rapidity. I fancy that some of her language is strong; but if you want anything here you must shout. I am right glad to hear that it is no worse with you. But just you be careful about cold. I know it is the worst enemy that I have, and I suspect that you will find the same. I have often wondered how you contrived to live in "a thorough draught." The time comes when one cannot do it, and that time came to me early. In the sunshine I begin to make some flesh, the wind no longer whistles through my ribs and I have not had ache or pain these two months. (Interval during which the writer gets himself out of the aforesaid sunshine which to-day has an African quality.) I wish you could be here, but wonder whether you could be demoralized; some demoralization would do you good, but I cannot imagine you as lazy as I am. Still you might try. And really though I am lazy I have managed to do some things that I should not have done at home and hope to have something to offer the Press when I return. The subject of my meditations is the damnability of corporations. I rather think that they must be damned: the Chartered for example.