A celebrated German oculist once told papa that if his instrument-maker were to send him such an ill-made machine as a human eye, he would send it back and refuse to pay the bill. I can understand that now; and yet on earth where should we be without eyes? And afterwards where should we be if some of us hadn't once had them on earth? * * * * * I can hear your dear voice, Gogo, with both ears. Why two ears? Why only two? What you want, or think, or feel, you try to tell me in sounds that you have been taught--English, French. If I didn't know English and French, it would be no good whatever. Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head--a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind--and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time! * * * * * And so with all the rest. We can't even smell straight! A dog would laugh at us--not that even a dog knows much! And feeling! We can feel too hot or too cold, and it sometimes makes us ill, or even kills us. But we can't feel the coming storm, or which is north and south, or where the new moon is, or the sun at midnight, or the stars at noon, or even what o'clock it is by our own measurement. We cannot even find our way home blindfolded--not even a pigeon can do that, nor a swallow, nor an owl! Only a mole, or a blind man, perhaps, feebly groping with a stick, if he has already been that way before. And taste! It is well said there is no accounting for it. And then, to keep all this going, we have to eat, and drink, and sleep, and all the rest. What a burden! * * * * * And you and I are the only mortals that I know of who ever found a way to each other's inner being by the touch of the hands. And then we had to go to sleep first. Our bodies were miles apart; not that _that_ would have made any difference, for we could never have done it waking--never; not if we hugged each other to extinction! * * * * * Gogo, I cannot find any words to tell you _how_, for there are none in any language that _I_ ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear and eye and the rest in _one_, and there is, oh, how much more besides! Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a magnet--even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch and taste a sound, as well as hear it, and _vice versa_. It is very simple, though it may not seem so to you now. And the sounds! Ah, what sounds! The thick atmosphere of earth is no conductor for such as _they_, and earthly ear-drums no receiver. Sound is everything. Sound and light are one. * * * * * And what does it all mean?