We found not only Paris but quite as much Lyons and Marseilles in a state of delirium over the Russian fleet officers, with whom we were muddled up all the way, greatly to our inconvenience. This was especially the case on leaving Lyons, where the railway officials, after having put our luggage (containing our circular notes) in the railway station, locked the doors of the latter in our faces, when the police and military officials hurried us down the hill again in the town (in the rudest of ways) till the arrival of the Russians nearly an hour after our train was timed to depart. We had no doubt that our hand baggage had all been carried off in our railway carriage without us and without labels; but on at last getting into the station found that our train had not started. This is one of the most charming places I have ever seen. The hotel is situated on the top of a hill which slopes for a mile to the sea, and which is thickly clothed with pine and olive woods in all directions. The climate admits of our sitting out of doors without overcoats or shawls till sunset, amid the most wonderful profusion of aromas I have ever met with. _To the Dean of Christ Church._ Costebelle: November 28, 1893. My dear Dean,--In the firmament of my friendships there is no such star as yourself, and I find it belongs to them all that the darker and the colder the night becomes, the more brightly do they shine. It is quite certain that 'the South has not yet rendered its full service,' inasmuch as it has not rendered me any service at all. If anything I am worse than when I left Oxford. My muscular power, indeed, has somewhat improved, but my nervous exhaustion seems to be growing upon me, week by week; so that I am now able to walk but very little--to hope, not much, to think, not at all. The truth is that my ailment, whatever it is, is not to be reached by climatic influences: it belongs to those mysterious internal changes, which Darwin ascribes to what he calls 'the nature of the organism'--'variations which to our ignorance appear to arise spontaneously.' Hence, I am out of harmony with my environment, whatever the environment may be. And, as this Spencerianism applies to my spiritual, no less than to my bodily organisation, it would seem that somehow or other I have been born into a wrong world--like those poor Porto Santo rabbits, which I took home with me last year, and the history of which I think I told you. However, I do not intend to grumble at the visible universe until I shall have had an opportunity of looking round the edge and seeing what is behind.