DEAR HERBERT,--To-day the world is shrouded in a thick, white, dripping mist. Glancing up in the warm room where I sit, I see nothing but grey window spaces. "How melancholy, how depressing," says my generally cheerful friend, Randall, staring sadly out into the blank air. But I myself do not agree. I am conscious of a vague, pleasurable excitement; a sense, too, of repose. This half light is grateful and cooling alike to eye and brain. Then, too, it is a change from ordinary conditions, and a change has always something invigorating about it. I steal about with an obscure sense that something mysterious is happening. And yet imagine some bright spirit of air and sunshine, like Ariel, flitting hither and thither above the mist, dipping his feet in the vapour, as a sea-bird flies low across the sea. Think of the pity he would feel for the poor human creatures, buried in darkness below, creeping hither and thither in the gloom. It is pleasurable enough within the house, but still more pleasurable to walk abroad; the little circle of dim vision passes with you, just revealing the road, the field, the pasture in which you walk. There is a delightful surprise about the way in which a familiar object looms up suddenly, a dim remote shape, and then as swiftly reveals the well-known outline. My path takes me past the line, and I hear a train that I cannot see roar past. I hear the sharp crack of the fog signals and the whistle blown. I pass close to the huge, dripping signals; there, in a hut beside a brazier, sits a plate-layer with his pole, watching the line, ready to push the little disc off the metals if the creaking signal overhead moves. In another lonely place stands a great luggage train waiting. The little chimney of the van smokes, and I hear the voices of guards and shunters talking cheerily together. I draw nearer home, and enter the college by the garden entrance. The black foliage of the ilex lowers overhead, and then in a moment, out of an overshadowing darkness, rises a battlemented tower like a fairy castle, with lights in the windows streaming out with straight golden rays into the fog. Below, the arched doorway reveals the faintly-lighted arches of the cloisters. The hanging, clinging, soaking mist--how it heightens the value, the comfort of the lighted windows of studious, fire-warmed rooms. And then what a wealth of pleasant images rises in the mind. I find myself thinking how the reading of certain authors is like this mist-walking; one seems to move in a dreary, narrow circle, and then suddenly a dim horror of blackness stands up; and then, again, in a moment one sees that it is some familiar thought which has thus won a stateliness, a remote mystery, from the atmosphere out of which it leans.