ept for me; he talked like a bad
character in an impudently bad farce; I could have laughed aloud to
hear, and could make you laugh by repeating, but laughter was not
uppermost.

This morning at about seven, I set off after the lost sheep. I could
have no horse; all that could be mounted--we have one girth-sore and one
dead-lame in the establishment--were due at a picnic about 10.30. The
morning was very wet, and I set off barefoot, with my trousers over my
knees, and a macintosh. Presently I had to take a side path in the bush;
missed it; came forth in a great oblong patch of taro solemnly
surrounded by forest--no soul, no sign, no sound--and as I stood there
at a loss, suddenly between the showers out broke the note of a
harmonium and a woman's voice singing an air that I know very well, but
have (as usual) forgot the name of. 'Twas from a great way off, but
seemed to fill the world. It was strongly romantic, and gave me a point
which brought me, by all sorts of forest wading, to an open space of
palms. These were of all ages, but mostly at that age when the branches
arch from the ground level, range themselves, with leaves exquisitely
green. The whole interspace was overgrown with convolvulus, purple,
yellow and white, often as deep as to my waist, in which I floundered
aimlessly. The very mountain was invisible from here. The rain came and
went; now in sunlit April showers, now with the proper tramp and rattle
of the tropics. All this while I met no sight or sound of man, except
the voice which was now silent, and a damned pig-fence that headed me
off at every corner. Do you know barbed wire? Think of a fence of it on
rotten posts, and you barefoot. But I crossed it at last with my heart
in my mouth and no harm done. Thence at last to C.'s.: no C. Next place
I came to was in the zone of woods. They offered me a buggy and set a
black boy to wash my legs and feet. "Washum legs belong that fellow
whiteman" was the command. So at last I ran down my son of a gun in the
hotel, sober, and with no story to tell; penitent, I think. As I sat and
looked at him, I knew from my inside the biggest truth in life: there is
only one thing that we cannot forgive, and that is ugliness--_our_
ugliness. There is no ugliness, no beauty; only that which makes me
(_ipse_) sicken or rejoice. And poor C. makes me sicken. Yet, according
to canons, he is not amiss. Home, by buggy and my poor feet, up three
miles of root, boulder, gravel, and l