Dear Waldo: Late amends for your last three letters, the first of which I got just as I was taking the schooner for Cayman! the last two yesterday when I returned. The trip was strenuous, four days instead of the expected two--each way, on account of head winds and calms. And let me tell you that to be “as idle as a painted,” etc., under this tropical sun with thirty-five cackling, puking, farting Negroes (women and children first) for a whole day or so (the water like a blinding glassy gridiron) is a novel experience. The first moral of the sea with the white man is clean decks; it’s the last considered with the Indian black. Vile water to drink, etc., etc., there’s no use recommending the facts further. And the much bruited Grand Cayman was some torment, I can survive to tell you. Flat and steaming under black clouds of mosquitoes, and not a square inch of screening on the island. I had to keep smudge fires burning incessantly in my room while I lunged back and forth, smiting myself all over like one in rigor mortis and smoke gouging salt penance from my eyes. The insects were enormous; Isle of Pines species can’t compare in size or number. After nine days and nights of that I staggered onto the schooner--and here I am--with a sunburn positively Ethiopian. I have pleasantly proved to myself, however, that under more sociably agreeable circumstances there is nothing to compare with a sail boat. The motion made me anything but sea-sick, with a good wind the rhythm is incomparable. More gorgeous skies than even you saw, acres of man-sized leaping porpoises (the “Huzza Porpoises” so aptly named in _Moby Dick_) that greet you in tandems (much like M. & Mme. Lachaise if you have ever seen them out walking together) and truly “arch and bend the horizons.” One enormous shark, a White Fin, lounged alongside for awhile. Had there been a place to sit or stand a few moments in the shade and fewer basins and chamber pots under the nose the trips would have been far from onerous. In spite of all, I find myself rather toughened and well. The exasperations and torments of such a siege make one grateful for modest amenities. Mrs. Simpson yesterday for the first time appeared to me as the Goddess of Liberty.