I am very glad to learn that your health on the whole has not been much worse since your visit to us last month. And I have no doubt that this last week's sunshine will have already improved it. Claire is now quite fit again after a mild attack of mumps, and goes back to Eastbourne in two days' time. With regard to your rheumatism, there are, as you say, several kinds of this complaint, or at any rate a good many affections that go popularly under the same name. And I think that it is quite likely that the wearing of a ring upon your third finger might very probably benefit your own particular variety, though I am much more doubtful about its efficacy in the case of your coachman's wife. Yes, there are two I's in bacilli, as you point out, but I'm afraid that the article you read in the paper is quite correct in stating that our insides contain a very large number of these active little animals. Nor is the female sex exempt, I'm sorry to say. But it is an idea that one soon gets used to, and I doubt if the measures that you suggest will make a very great difference either to their health or your own. But there was once a wise old doctor who used to say that between milk and good sound blood there was no difference but the colour. Personally I prefer it sweet. But the sour kind is no doubt better than none at all. With best love from Esther and the girls, Your affect. nephew, PETER HARDING. IV _To Colonel R. F. Morris, C.B., 7th Division, Meerut, India._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _March_ 15, 1910. MY DEAR RUPERT, It gave me real joy to see your hand-writing again this morning on the breakfast-table. Only last week I had been thinking that one of your rare letters was about due. So you have just had the time of your life, have you, during your last shoot in Kashmir, and find Meerut, as a result, pretty deadly--and oh to be in England now that April's nearly there? A pestilent thing, isn't it, this divine discontent? Only last week I had a letter from old Bob Lynn. You remember Bob. You were his fag, I think, for half a term. London, London, London--that was the burden of his desire; and he with a trout stream, by turns cavernous and romantic and sheerly lyrical, splashing his very doorstep! And now here are you, too, sighing for Pall Mall and the Park, whereas I, who have them both, would hold six months at Meerut as a cheap price indeed for those seven weeks of Kashmir forests. Is it racial, or universal, or merely temperamental, I wonder, this passionate yearning to be elsewhere--some uncrushable remnant of Romance? I give it up. I am sure that it is a nuisance; and equally certain that it is in reality the very salt of life.