“I am very well, almost as well as before my gout; but I am rather dull, as you were just saying to each other. However, your return will brighten me, and you shall take me to the play and the opera and Madame Tussaud’s just as often as you please. And I invite myself to dine with you too--I mean two. Am I not generous? The nearer I get to the end of my sheet (like a prisoner escaping and doubtful where he was going to drop) the more I wonder where Wildbad is. I shall ask at a foreign book-shop. That is the simplest plan, for they are all kept by German Jews who know every place where Christians are plundered the world over. And if a Bad of any kind does not come within that definition I am greatly mistaken. My only doubt would be as to whether you were Christians? Well, you have always treated me as if you were. Good-by.” Lowell spent a night at Chester with Mr. Hughes and sailed from Liverpool 22 November. He spent the winter of 1888-1889 at his sister’s, Mrs. Putnam’s, in Boston. He found himself physically depressed and disinclined to any effort. A hasty acceptance of an invitation to lecture in Philadelphia brought him intolerable discomfort, and he begged to be let off, if it could be done without prejudice to his hosts. “It is absurd,” he wrote, “but I was made so. I won’t torment myself by speaking in public any more. With any such engagement on my mind, I can do nothing else, and indeed do nothing but think about that.” Dr. Mitchell at once released him, and Lowell wrote in reply, 27 December, 1888: “I got your welcome letter last evening, and when I first looked in the glass this morning I was pleased to find my hair less gray than when I went to bed. You never wrote a better prescription. My mind has been relieved of what really seemed to me an intolerable weight, for, whether it be from old age or whatever cause, I have been undoubtedly inert both in body and mind since my attack of gout last summer.” On the same day he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “Many thanks for your welcome home. I am miserably dumpy, thank you, with the remains of my tedious fit of gout last summer, which continues to hold my frontier posts as the British did ours after the treaty of 1783. But I hope to go on to Washington early in February in time to get back for my seventieth birthday, which I can’t spend in the tents of Kedar.”