I am suffering from acute nostalgia--by this time you are standing in the gun-room at Keith Lodge, drinking your first. I can hear Duncan ask: "Scotch or Irish," and see you tip it off with Blake and the rest. No bridge for you tonight--early to bed and tomorrow morning you'll all start out in your natty knickers and short kilts to murder things that will fall in bloody feathery heaps at your feet. Native woodcock, jack snipe, black mallard, grouse, etc., the restless eager setters doing their own retrieving; the soft dank ground daintily overspread with the frond of marvelous fern like my window pane this morning with its delicate tracery in frost; the tall-stemmed alders echoing your shots to skyward; the big dense timber with its springy ground all saturated with the fragrance of the mounting sea: I seem like something dead whispering to you from the tomb. Nothing lasts longer than twenty-four hours in New York--not even a memory, so no one misses me. It's another of God's jollies and I know I'm ungrateful dear, for you are thinking of me I know, with my dear old "Sport" ready to point for you tomorrow, just to receive your pats of recognition and thanks. My feelings are worn into meaningless smoothness like the head on an old coin, and because I have added my quota of absurdity to the morning papers I am no longer interesting. But, pshaw! one can't buy cocaine for a nickel, and as I could live extravagantly on the interest of my debts, I haven't more than five cents to invest. Don't mind this slump in grit--it will return to par and slang tomorrow. Keep a record of all you do to send to me, and above all--win the cup. With whom are you shooting? I will now stuff the cracks of my door with medicated cotton, open the portholes and smoke my cigarette alone--Lord preserve me, if anybody knew! See if you can't get the Humane Society to form a branch out here to feed and water the widows. I have just returned from a little walk with Carlton--I suppose my eyes prattled, for he smiled at me through his wrinkles and was rather more thoughtful of my comforts than usual. His _Insouciance_ is charming and always turns the tide of my melancholy. He is the only man who ever ventured to stand on my tack and take me broadsides. We have framed up a little Bacchic plot to be enacted on our way back from the Post where I shall soon meander to mail this on the late Rock Island.