I am glad that you have determined to go up for your second medical some time next year, and note that you have taken away volumes of anatomy and physiology in your trunk. If you will accept my paternal advice, however, you will leave them there until you have decided that your health is sufficiently recuperated to return either to Cambridge or Harley Street. I don't want you to curtail your holidays. I have far too much respect both for holidays in general and yourself in particular. For it's one of the most pathetic features about the genuine old codger (and one of his surest signs too) that his periods of recreation tend to become progressively shorter--and not always by force of circumstances. They may actually begin to bore him. He may even have to make an effort of will to prolong them for his ultimate good--to school himself into regarding them as cures. Thus, while at twenty-two a summer vacation of less than two months is too monstrous to be seriously considered, at forty-two one becomes grateful for a fortnight, could do with three weeks, but is apt to find a month just a trifle too long. Whereas at fifty-two---- So don't curtail them. And yet better is it to curtail them than to pollute. And unless you particularly need them for preserving specimens of the local flora or maintaining the creases upon your Sunday trousers, you should never, never, never pack technical books in a holiday trunk. It is to put poison--or at any rate water--into the wine that you are to pour out before the gods of mountain and moor and loch. And though they are generous they are proud. And they will surely make you repent it--not merely because it is tactless, as though you should make Miss Dolly--I think that was her name?--the staple article of your conversations with Miss Graham; and not merely because it shows your ignorance, as though you should munch ginger-nuts with that fine old port which your uncle has dug up for your especial benefit; but because--far worse--it is an evidence of double-dealing. And no god, not even the presiding deity of the tiniest mountain ash, is going to stand that. If you read your Bible, as I hope you do, you will have been warned concerning this simultaneous worship of two contrary masters, and the doom that must certainly befall it. And that's why no really wise schoolmaster ever sets his pupils a holiday task, though there are still, I'm afraid, a few foolish ones left. I hardly like to think that mine can have been among them; and yet there's no doubt that "Marmion," the "Lady of the Lake," the "Cloister and the Hearth," and several other peaks upon the literary landscape remain clouded to me for ever.