iquid mud, slipping back at every
step.

_Sunday, Sept. 4th._--Hope you will be able to read a word of the last,
no joke writing by a bad lantern with a groggy hand and your glasses
mislaid. Not that the hand is not better, as you see by the absence of
the amanuensis hitherto. Mail came Friday, and a communication from
yourself much more decent than usual, for which I thank you. Glad the
_Wrecker_ should so hum; but Lord, what fools these mortals be!

So far yesterday, the citation being wrung from me by remembrance of
many reviews. I have now received all _Falesa_, and my admiration for
that tale rises; I believe it is in some ways my best work; I am pretty
sure, at least, I have never done anything better than Wiltshire.

_Monday, 13th September 1892._--On Wednesday the Spinsters of Apia gave
a ball to a select crowd. Fanny, Belle, Lloyd, and I rode down, met
Haggard by the way and joined company with him. Dinner with Haggard, and
thence to the ball. The Chief Justice appeared; it was immediately
remarked, and whispered from one to another, that he and I had the only
red sashes in the room,--and they were both of the hue of blood, sir,
blood. He shook hands with myself and all the members of my family. Then
the cream came, and I found myself in the same set of a quadrille with
his honour. We dance here in Apia a most fearful and wonderful
quadrille, I don't know where the devil they fished it from; but it is
rackety and prancing and embraceatory beyond words; perhaps it is best
defined in Haggard's expression of a gambado. When I and my great enemy
found ourselves involved in this gambol, and crossing hands, and kicking
up, and being embraced almost in common by large and quite respectable
females, we--or I--tried to preserve some rags of dignity, but not for
long. The deuce of it is that, personally, I love this man; his eye
speaks to me, I am pleased in his society. We exchanged a glance, and
then a grin; the man took me in his confidence; and through the
remainder of that prance we pranced for each other. Hard to imagine any
position more ridiculous; a week before he had been trying to rake up
evidence against me by brow-beating and threatening a half-white
interpreter; that very morning I had been writing most villainous
attacks upon him for the Times; and we meet and smile, and--damn
it!--like each other. I do my best to damn the man and drive him from
these islands; but the weakness endures--I love him. This i