I have just heard from your sister-in-law of your enforced furlough. I am not going to help you curse your luck, knowing your native capabilities in that direction to be perfectly adequate, but my Methodist training urges me to give you an epistolary hand-shake, the purport of which is "_Keep your sand._" I could say other things, not utterly pharisaical. I could say what I have often said to myself, with a rather reedy tremolo perhaps, but swelling sometimes into a respectable diapason. "The dark cellar ripens the wine." And meanwhile, after one's eyes get used to the dirty light, and one's feet to the mildew, a cellar has its compensations. I have found beetles of the most interesting proclivities, mice altogether comradely and persuadable, and forgotten potatoes that sprouted toward the crack of sunshine with a wan maiden grace not seen above. I don't want to pose as resourceful, but I have seen what I have seen. The metaphor is however happily inexact in your case, with Milton to retire to and Cambridge humming melodiously on the horizon. If you can only throttle your Daemon, or make him forgoe his leonine admonition "Accomplish," and roar you as any sucking dove the sweet vocable "Be"--you ought to live. I have got mine trained to that, pardee! and his voice grows not untunable. I pick up shreds of comfort out of this or that one of God's ashbarrels. Yesterday I was skating on a patch of ice in the park, under a poverty stricken sky flying a pitiful rag of sunset. Some little muckers were guying a slim raw-boned Irish girl of fifteen, who circled and darted under their banter with complete unconcern. She was in the fledgling stage, all legs and arms, tall and adorably awkward, with a huge hat full of rusty feathers, thin skirts tucked up above spindling ankles, and a gay aplomb and swing in the body that was ravishing. We caught hands in midflight, and skated for an hour, almost alone and quite silent, while the rag of sunset rotted to pieces. I have had few sensations in life that I would exchange for the warmth of her hand through the ragged glove, and the pathetic curve of the half-formed breast where the back of my wrist touched her body. I came away mystically shaken and elate. It is thus the angels converse. She was something absolutely authentic, new, and inexpressible, something which only nature could mix for the heart's intoxication, a compound of ragamuffin, pal, mistress, nun, sister, harlequin, outcast, and bird of God,--with something else bafflingly suffused, something ridiculous and frail and savage and tender. With a world offering such rencontres, such aery strifes and adventures, who would not live a thousand years stone dumb? I would, for one--until my mood changes and I come to think on the shut lid and granite lip of him who has had done with