_Monday_.—The end of the work displays gaps, cairns of ten ton blocks, stones torn from their places and turned right round. The damage above water is comparatively little: what there may be below, _on ne sait pas encore_. The roadway is torn away, cross heads, broken planks tossed here and there, planks gnawn and mumbled as if a starved bear had been trying to eat them, planks with spales lifted from them as if they had been dressed with a rugged plane, one pile swaying to and fro clear of the bottom, the rails in one place sunk a foot at least. This was not a great storm, the waves were light and short. Yet when we are standing at the office, I felt the ground beneath me _quail_ as a huge roller thundered on the work at the last year’s cross wall. How could _noster amicus Q. maximus_ appreciate a storm at Wick? It requires a little of the artistic temperament, of which Mr. T. S., {24} C.E., possesses some, whatever he may say. I can’t look at it practically however: that will come, I suppose, like grey hair or coffin nails. Our pole is snapped: a fortnight’s work and the loss of the Norse schooner all for nothing!—except experience and dirty clothes.—Your affectionate son, R. L. STEVENSON. TO MRS. CHURCHILL BABINGTON [_Swanston Cottage_, _Lothianburn_, _Summer_ 1871.] MY DEAR MAUD,—If you have forgotten the hand-writing—as is like enough—you will find the name of a former correspondent (don’t know how to spell that word) at the end. I have begun to write to you before now, but always stuck somehow, and left it to drown in a drawerful of like fiascos. This time I am determined to carry through, though I have nothing specially to say. We look fairly like summer this morning; the trees are blackening out of their spring greens; the warmer suns have melted the hoarfrost of daisies of the paddock; and the blackbird, I fear, already beginning to ‘stint his pipe of mellower days’—which is very apposite (I can’t spell anything to-day—_one_ p or _two_?) and pretty. All the same, we have been having shocking weather—cold winds and grey skies. I have been reading heaps of nice books; but I can’t go back so far. I am reading Clarendon’s _Hist. Rebell._ at present, with which I am more pleased than I expected, which is saying a good deal. It is a pet idea of mine that one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists—wolves in sheep’s clothing—simpering honesty as they suppress documents. After all, what one wants to know is not what people did, but why they did it—or rather, why they _thought_ they did it; and to learn that, you should go to the men themselves. Their very falsehood is often more than another man’s truth.