_Saturday._--It has been colder than ever; and to-night there is a truculent wind about the house, shaking the windows and making a hollow inarticulate grumbling in the chimney. I cannot say how much I hate the cold. It makes my scalp so tight across my head and gives me such a beastly rheumatism about my shoulders, and wrinkles and stiffens my face; O I have such a _Sehnsucht_ for Mentone, where the sun is shining and the air still, and (a friend writes to me) people are complaining of the heat. _Sunday._--I was chased out by my lamp again last night; it always goes out when I feel in the humour to write to you. To-day I have been to Church, which has not improved my temper I must own. The clergyman did his best to make me hate him, and I took refuge in that admirable poem the Song of Deborah and Barak; I should like to make a long scroll of painting (say to go all round a cornice) illustrative of this poem; with the people seen in the distance going stealthily on footpaths while the great highways go vacant; with the archers besetting the draw-wells; with the princes in hiding on the hills among the bleating sheep-flocks; with the overthrow of Sisera, the stars fighting against him in their courses and that ancient river, the river Kishon, sweeping him away in anger; with his mother looking and looking down the long road in the red sunset, and never a banner and never a spear-clump coming into sight, and her women with white faces round her, ready with lying comfort. To say nothing of the people on white asses. O, I do hate this damned life that I lead. Work--work--work; that's all right, it's amusing; but I want women about me and I want pleasure. John Knox had a better time of it than I, with his godly females all leaving their husbands to follow after him; I would I were John Knox; I hate living like a hermit. Write me a nice letter if ever you are in the humour to write to me, and it doesn't hurt your head. Good-bye.--Ever your faithful friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MRS. SITWELL. The projected visit to his Russian friend in Poland did not come off, and shortly after the preceding letter Stevenson went for a few days' walking tour in the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire, as recorded in his essay _An Autumn Effect_. He then came on for a visit to London. [_London, November 1874._]