"Lavengro" is another work which can only be appreciated in these surroundings. I have read it at least six times since leaving London, but it never palls on my taste, never grows dull, and exercises the same fascination as on the first perusal. Nay, more; Fate has taken a leaf from that glorious book and bestowed on me an adventure or so in the Borrovian style. My dell is a replica of that famous Dingle, and--would you believe it?--I have done battle with an individual like the Flaming Tinman. He also is a tinker and a bruiser, but here the resemblance ends. He is not a brute, and has no doxy trailing at his heels. Nor, alas! did he bring me an Isopel to whom I could teach--say French, in place of Armenian. One can say many pretty things in French, and the verbs lend themselves as readily to a philological flirtation as does the more recondite language of Lavengro. But I have no Isopel--at present. I see you raise your eyebrows at those two last words. You are wrong to suspect evil where none exists. It is true that there is a nymph of these parts--but I had better tell you the beginning of the story. On the night of my arrival in this dell, there came to me a red-cloaked hag who prophesied like a veritable Deborah. Only one scrap of her jargon do I recollect--that Joy should come up through the Gates of Dawn. These same gates are two giant cliffs that stand sentinel at the entrance to Farbis valley. I went down for a swim next morning, and when the sun rose out of the ocean and poured his beams through this chasm, it looked not unlike the Gates of the Day. The name is a poetical one, and pretty. I can quite understand some mute inglorious Milton having so christened this natural entrance. Here I saw Joy coming up as predicted, in the person of a lovely young woman, whom I at first took to be a mermaid, but the sight of whose bare feet dispelled the illusion. I caught but a glimpse of her face, and----