COLVIN,--The attempt to correspond with you is vain. Well, well, then so be it. I will from time to time write you an insulting letter, brief but monstrous harsh. I regard you in the light of a genteel impostor. Your name figures in the papers but never to a piece of letter-paper: well, well. News. I am well: Fanny been ill but better: _Otto_ about three-quarters done; _Silverado_ proofs a terrible job--it is a most unequal work--new wine in old bottles--large rats, small bottles:[5] as usual, penniless--O but penniless: still, with four articles in hand (say L35) and the L100 for _Silverado_ imminent, not hopeless. Why am I so penniless, ever, ever penniless, ever, ever penny-penny-penniless and dry? The birds upon the thorn, The poppies in the corn, They surely are more fortunate or prudenter than I! In Arabia, everybody is called the Father of something or other for convenience or insult's sake. Thus you are "the Father of Prints," or of "Bummkopferies," or "Father of Unanswered Correspondence." They would instantly dub Henley "the Father of Wooden Legs"; me they would denominate the "Father of Bones," and Matthew Arnold "the Father of Eyeglasses." I have accepted most of the excisions. Proposed titles:-- The Innocent Muse. A Child's Garden of Rhymes. Songs of the Playroom. Nursery Songs. I like the first? R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude, Hyeres, May or June 1883._ DEAR LAD,--Snatches in return for yours; for this little once, I'm well to windward of you. Seventeen chapters of _Otto_ are now drafted, and finding I was working through my voice and getting screechy, I have turned back again to rewrite the earlier part. It has, I do believe, some merit: of what order, of course, I am the last to know; and, triumph of triumphs, my wife--my wife who hates and loathes and slates my women--admits a great part of my Countess to be on the spot. Yes, I could borrow, but it is the joy of being before the public, for once. Really, L100 is a sight more than _Treasure Island_ is worth. The reason of my _deche_? Well, if you begin one house, have to desert it, begin another, and are eight months without doing any work, you will be in a _deche_ too. I am not in a _deche_, however; _distingue_--I would fain distinguish; I am rather a swell, but _not solvent_. At a touch the edifice, _aedificium_, might collapse. If my creditors began to babble around me, I would sink with a slow strain of music into the crimson west. The difficulty in my elegant villa is to find oil, _oleum_, for the dam axles. But I've paid my rent until September; and beyond the chemist, the grocer, the baker, the doctor, the gardener, Lloyd's teacher, and the great chief creditor Death, I can snap my fingers at all men. Why will people spring bills on you? I try to make 'em charge me at the moment; they won't, the money goes, the debt remains.--The Required Play is in the _Merry Men_. Q. E. F.