Arthur, dear, am I a disappointing person, do you find? Ought I to be able to write you different sorts of letters, tenderer, more loving letters? But, you see, it wouldn't be me if I could. My heart may be, indeed, I think it is, full of the warmest instincts, but they have been unwinged from birth so they can't fly to you. One of the most talkative people living, in some ways I am strangely speechless. Why! I haven't even told Boggley, though if he had eyes to see instead of being the blindest of dear old bats, my shining face would betray me. I keep on smiling in a perfectly imbecile manner, so that people exclaim, "Well, you are indecently glad to get away," and when they ask Why? I point them to the scene in the Old Testament where Hadad said unto Pharaoh, "_Let me depart, that I may go to mine own country." Then Pharaoh said unto him, "But what hast thou lacked with me, that, behold, thou seekest to go to thine own country?" And he answered, "Nothing: howbeit let me go in any wise_." So it is with me. India has given me the best of good times. I have lacked for nothing--"howbeit let me go in any wise." You needn't think I am changed. I'm not. I'm afraid I'm not. One would think that a new environment would make a difference, but it really does not. A person with a suburban mind would be as suburban in the wilds of Nepal as in the wilds of Tooting. The illuminating thought has come to me that it isn't a man's environment that matters, it's his mind. Haven't you often noticed in an evening in London all the City men hurrying home like rabbits to their burrows (not the prosperous City men, but the lesser ones, whose frock-coats are rather shiny and their silk hats rather dull), and haven't you often thought how narrow their lives are, how cramping their environment? But suppose one of those clerks loves books and is something of a poet. What does it matter to him though his rooms in Clapham or Brixton are grimy, almost squalid, and filled with the worst kind of Victorian furniture? "Minds innocent and quiet take such for an hermitage." Once inside, the long day at the office over, and the door shut on the world, an arm-chair drawn up to the fire and his books around him he is as happy as a king, for his mind to him is a Kingdom. He may be a puny little man, in bodily presence contemptible, but he will feel no physical disabilities as he clambers on the wall of Jerusalem with Count Raymond, or thrills as he sets forth with Drake to fight Spaniards one against ten. Instead of the raucous cries of the milk or the coal man, he hears the horns of Elfland faintly blowing, and instead of a window which can show him nothing but a sodden plot planted with wearied-looking shrubs, he has the key of that magic casement which opens on perilous seas in fairylands forlorn. He will never do anything great in the world, he will never lead a forlorn hope, or marry the Princess, or see far lands; he will never be anything but a poor, shabby clerk, but he is