ts folds, but do not fasten it with any brooch. I swear
to you, in your talking robes, there should be no patch of adornment;
and where the subject forces, let it force you no further than it must;
and be ready with a twinkle of your pleasantry. Yours is a fine tool,
and I see so well how to hold it; I wonder if you see how to hold mine?
But then I am to the neck in prose, and just now in the "dark
_interstylar_ cave," all methods and effects wooing me, myself in the
midst impotent to follow any. I look for dawn presently, and a full
flowing river of expression, running whither it wills. But these useless
seasons, above all, when a man _must_ continue to spoil paper, are
infinitely weary.

We are in our house after a fashion; without furniture, 'tis true,
camping there, like the family after a sale. But the bailiff has not yet
appeared; he will probably come after. The place is beautiful beyond
dreams; some fifty miles of the Pacific spread in front; deep woods all
round; a mountain making in the sky a profile of huge trees upon our
left; about us, the little island of our clearing, studded with brave
old gentlemen (or ladies, or "the twa o' them") whom we have spared. It
is a good place to be in; night and morning, we have Theodore Rousseaus
(always a new one) hung to amuse us on the walls of the world; and the
moon--this is our good season, we have a moon just now--makes the night
a piece of heaven. It amazes me how people can live on in the dirty
north; yet if you saw our rainy season (which is really a caulker for
wind, wet, and darkness--howling showers, roaring winds, pit-blackness
at noon) you might marvel how we could endure that. And we can't. But
there's a winter everywhere; only ours is in the summer. Mark my words:
there will be a winter in heaven--and in hell. _Cela rentre dans les
procedes du bon Dieu; et vous verrez!_ There's another very good thing
about Vailima, I am away from the little bubble of the literary life. It
is not all beer and skittles, is it? By the by, my _Ballads_ seem to
have been dam bad; all the crickets sing so in their crickety papers;
and I have no ghost of an idea on the point myself: verse is always to
me the unknowable. You might tell me how it strikes a professional bard:
not that it really matters, for, of course, good or bad, I don't think I
shall get into _that_ galley any more. But I should like to know if you
join the shrill chorus of the crickets. The crickets are the devil