onorable
poverty: and to be misunderstood pricks him in the thinnest of thin
places.

He told me also that he brought only three white ties to last him for
seven days: and that Graves placed them out in order of freshness and
cleanliness night after night:--first three new ones consecutively, then
three once worn. After that, on the seventh day, Graves resigned all
further responsibility, and laid out all three of them for him to choose
from. On the last three days of his stay he did me the honor to leave his
coat out, declaring that my mendings had made it presentable before an
emperor. Out of this dates the whole of his character, and I understand,
what I did not, why Arthur and he get on together.

Now the house is empty, and your comings will be--I cannot say more
welcome: but there will be more room for them to be after my own heart.

Heaven be over us both. Faithfully your most loving.

LETTER LIII.

Beloved: I wish you could have been with me to look out into this garden
last night when the spirit moved me there. I had started for bed, but
became sensitive of something outside not normal. Whether my ear missed
the usual echoes and so guessed a muffled world I do not know. To open the
door was like slicing into a wedding-cake; then,--where was I to put a
foot into that new-laid carpet of ankle-deepness? I hobbled out in a pair
of my uncle's. I suppose it is because I know every tree and shrub in its
true form that snow seems to pile itself nowhere as it does here: it
becomes a garden of entombments. Now and then some heap would shuffle
feebly under its shroud, but resurrection was not to be: the Lawson
cypress held out great boxing-glove hands for me to shake and set free;
and the silence was wonderful. I padded about till I froze: this morning I
can see my big hoof-marks all over the place, and Benjy has been
scampering about in them as if he found some flavor of me there. The trees
are already beginning to shake themselves loose, and the spell is over:
but it had a wonderful hold while it lasted. I take a breath back into
last night, and feel myself again full of a romance without words that I
cannot explain. If you had been there, even, I think I could have
forgotten I had you by me, the place was so weighed down with its sense of
solitude. It struck eleven while I was outside, and in that, too, I could
hear a muffle as if snow choked all the belfry lattices and lay even on
the outer edge of the be