I discovered I was putting all this into the form of a letter to Mary. I was writing to her in my mind, as many people talk to themselves. And I remember that I wandered upon the Palatine Hill musing over the idea of writing a long letter to her, a long continuous letter to her, a sort of diary of impressions and ideas, that somewhen, years ahead, I might be able to put into her hands. One does not carry out such an idea into reality; it is so much easier to leave the letter imagined and unwritten if there lives but little hope of its delivery; yet for many years I kept up an impalpable correspondence in my thoughts, a stream of expression to which no answer came--until at last the habits of public writing and the gathering interests of a new rôle in life diverted it to other ends. § 8 One morning on the way from Brindisi to Egypt I came up on deck at dawn because my mind was restless and I could not sleep. Another solitary passenger was already up, so intently watching a pink-lit rocky coast-line away to the north of us that for a time he did not observe me. "That's Crete," he said, when at last he became aware of me close at hand. "Crete!" said I. "Yes," he said, "Crete." He came nearer to me. "That, sir," he said with a challenging emphasis, "is the most wonderful island I've ever yet set eyes on,--quite the most wonderful." "Five thousand years ago," he remarked after a pause that seemed to me to be calculated, "they were building palaces there, better than the best we can build to-day. And things--like modern things. They had bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms--and admirable sanitation--admirable. Practically--American. They had better artists to serve them than your King Edward has, why! Minos would have laughed or screamed at all that Windsor furniture. And the things they made of gold, sir--you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. Not for any money. There was a Go about them.... They had a kind of writing, too--before the Phoenicians. No man can read it now, and there it is. Fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day--They grow oranges and lemons. And they riot.... Everything else gone.... It's as if men struggled up to a certain pitch and then--grew tired.... All this Mediterranean; it's a tired sea...." That was the beginning of a curious conversation. He was an American, a year or so younger than myself, going, he said, "to look at Egypt."