The outside of your letter gave me, I confess, less pleasure than any I have ever had from you. You know the state of Sicily, and the way brigands have with people whom they believe to have money. Consequently, when ordered here by the doctors I was urged both in Naples and Messina to drop my title absolutely; and I am known here only as "B. Crichton Stuart." You may thus imagine the discontent with which I saw "The Marquess of Bute" staring me in the face out of the letter-rack in the hall. Pray be most careful both to address me only as B.C.S., and also to keep your knowledge of my whereabouts most strictly to yourself. I need not point out the great annoyance and possible danger to which you might otherwise expose me. I have been very ailing for more than a year. {166} Sometimes I feel as though the horizon of life were closing in, and wish I could recall the rest of the verse beginning: When languor and disease invade This trembling house of clay....[5] But the warmth and sunshine here are helping me. I propose, when my "cure" is over (for good or evil), to go to Greece, and look for quarters in Athens where I may spend the winter with my wife and child. I prefer this place to Italy, at least to Naples, whose people on the whole impress me as the off-scourings of humanity. The great difference between Sicily and Italy strikes me very much: it is, perhaps, due to the fact that Sicily belongs (I believe), both geographically and geologically, to Africa. From Egypt, where he spent one spring, being ordered a spell of dry desert air by the doctors, he wrote characteristically to a friend (a Benedictine monk), then resident in a remote corner of Brazil: Helouan, Egypt. I deserve your reproaches for not writing before. But really one has a feeling (I know _I_ have) that writing to a distant address is, literally and physically, an heavier undertaking than writing to a near one. Query: If some philosophers are right in thinking that space, as well as time, is purely subjective, may not this have something to do with it? One or two notes from his diary in Egypt are interesting: "_March_ 7. Amin Nassif brought a "professed {167} sorcerer to see me" (a later note adds, "I believe him to be a pure impostor"). "_March_ 15. Tried the ascent of the great Pyramid, but collapsed from giddiness half-way. Margaret [his daughter, then aged sixteen] had no difficulty."[6] "_April_ 6. Monophysite Copts do not now reserve the B. Sacrament (although they formerly did so), because the species was once eaten by a snake, which was then eaten by a priest, who died in consequence!" "_April_ 24 (Alexandria). At the Greek Catholic church the new French Consul was received with extraordinary honour by three priests, vested respectively in red, white, and blue! There was no sermon, but a speech in which the benefits conferred by France on Syria and Egypt were highly praised." [Sidenote: 1891, Trip to Teneriffe]