For breakfast we had excellent-flavored coffee, hot and strong--not very clear and no great deal of cream--veal cutlets, elegant ham and eggs and nice bread and butter. I never sat down to a more plentiful or a nicer breakfast. I wish you could have seen the eggs--and the great dishes of meat. Sis [his wife] is delighted, and we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any and had no night sweat. She is now busy mending my pants, which I tore against a nail. I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a skein of thread, two buttons, a pair of slippers, and a tin pan for the stove. The fire kept in all night. We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. I feel in excellent spirits, and haven't drank a drop--so that I hope soon to get out of trouble. [Illustration] Yes, let us clear the typewriter off the table: an ink-well is a sacred thing. Do you ever stop to think, when you see the grimy spattered desks of a public post-office, how many eager or puzzled human hearts have tried, in those dingy little ink-cups, to set themselves right with fortune? What blissful meetings have been appointed, what scribblings of pain and sorrow, out of those founts of common speech. And the ink-wells on hotel counters--does not the public dipping place of the Bellevue Hotel, Boston, win a new dignity in my memory when I know (as I learned lately) that Rupert Brooke registered there in the spring of 1914? I remember, too, a certain pleasant vibration when, signing my name one day in the Bellevue's book, I found Miss Agnes Repplier's autograph a little above on the same page. Among our younger friends, Vachel Lindsay comes to mind as one who has done honor to the ink-well. His _Apology for the Bottle Volcanic_ is in his best flow of secret smiling (save an unfortunate dilution of Riley): Sometimes I dip my pen and find the bottle full of fire, The salamanders flying forth I cannot but admire.... O sad deceiving ink, as bad as liquor in its way-- All demons of a bottle size have pranced from you to-day, And seized my pen for hobby-horse as witches ride a broom, And left a trail of brimstone words and blots and gobs of gloom. And yet when I am extra good ... [_here I omit the transfusion of Riley_] My bottle spreads a rainbow mist, and from the vapor fine Ten thousand troops from fairyland come riding in a line.