DEAR SIRS: I have your letter and I take the greatest possible pleasure in enclosing my cheque to cover the additional expense, as you kindly suggest. Very truly yours, BEVERLEY SANDS. BEVERLEY SANDS TO BEN DOOLITTLE _October 30._ DEAR BEN: They are gone! They're off! They have weighed anchor! They have sailed; they have departed! I went down and watched the steamer out of sight. Packed around me at the end of the pier were people, waving hats and handkerchiefs, some laughing, some with tears on their cheeks, some with farewells quivering on their dumb mouths. But everybody forgot his joy or his trouble to look at me: I out-waved, out-shouted them all. An old New York Harbour gull, which is the last creature in the world to be surprised at anything, flew up and glanced at me with a jaded eye. I have felt ever since as if the steamer's anchor had been taken from around my neck. I have become as human cork which no storm, no leaden weight, could ever sink. Come what will to me now from Nature's unkinder powers! Let my next pair of shoes be made of briers, my next waistcoat of rag weed! Fasten every morning around my neck a collar of the scaly-bark hickory! See to it that my undershirts be made of the honey-locust! For olives serve me green persimmons; if I must be poulticed, swab me in poultices of pawpaws! But for the rest of my days may the Maker of the world in His occasional benevolence save me from the things on it that look frail and harmless like ferns. Come up to dinner! Come, all there is of you! We'll open the friendly door of some friendly place and I'll dine you on everything commensurate with your simplicity. I'll open a magnum or a magnissimum. I'll open a new subway and roll down into it for joy. They are gone to him, his emblems of fidelity. I don't care what he does with them. They will for the rest of his days admonish him that in his letter to me he sinned against the highest law of his own gloriously endowed nature: _Le Génie Oblige_ Accept this phrase, framed by me for your pilgrim's script of wayside French sayings. Accept it and translate it to mean that he who has genius, no matter what the world may do to him, no matter what ruin Nature may work in him, that he who has genius, is under obligation so long as he lives to do nothing mean and to do nothing meanly. BEVERLEY. ANNE RAEBURN TO EDWARD BLACKTHORNE IN ITALY _King Alfred's Wood, Warwickshire, England, November 30._ MY DEAR MR. BLACKTHORNE: I continue my chronicles of an English country-place during the absence of its master, with the hope that the reading of the chronicles may cause him to hasten his return.