“---- The old woman with the little white cloud above her head, who pointed to it and said: ‘It won’t rain to-day!’ that poor, shrivelled old woman whose sack I carried on my shoulders” (he had followed his fancy of travelling on foot for four days across the Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, and had slept a night at Covigliajo) “and whom I kissed when we got to the top of the hill ... one of what the _curé_ of Covigliajo would have called my ‘good actions.’ I could just as easily have throttled her--my hand would have been steady--when I felt her dirty wrinkled skin beneath my fingers.... Ah! how caressingly she stroked and dusted my coat collar and said ‘_figlio mio! carino!_’ ... I wonder what made my joy so intense when afterwards--I was still in a sweat--I lay down on the moss--not smoking though--in the shade of that big chestnut-tree. I felt as though I could have clasped the whole of mankind to my heart in my single embrace--or strangled it, for that matter. Human life! What a paltry thing! And with what alacrity I’d risk mine if only some deed of gallantry would turn up--something really rather pleasantly rash and daring!... All the same, I can’t turn alpinist or aviator.... I wonder what that hidebound old Julius would advise.... It’s a pity he’s such a stick-in-the-mud! I should have liked to have a brother. “Poor Julius! So many writers and so few readers! It’s a fact. People read less and less nowadays ... to judge by myself, as they say. It’ll end by some catastrophe--some stupendous catastrophe, reeking with horror. Printing will be chucked overboard altogether; and it’ll be a miracle if the best doesn’t sink to the bottom with the worst. “But the curious thing would be to know what the old woman would have said if I had begun to squeeze. One imagines _what would happen if_, but there’s always a little hiatus through which the unexpected creeps in. Nothing ever happens exactly as one thinks it’s going to.... That’s what makes me want to act.... One does so little!... ‘Let all that can be, be!’ That’s my explanation of the Creation.... In love with what might be. If I were the Government I should lock myself up. “Nothing very exciting about the correspondence of that Monsieur Gaspard Flamand which I claimed as mine at the Poste Restante at Bologna. Nothing that would have been worth the trouble of returning to him.