t all hours of the day
and night on horseback; holding meetings with all manner of chiefs;
quite a political personage--God save the mark!--in a small way, but at
heart very conscious of the inevitable flat failure that awaits every
one. I shall never do a better book than _Catriona_, that is my
high-water mark, and the trouble of production increases on me at a
great rate--and mighty anxious about how I am to leave my family: an
elderly man, with elderly preoccupations, whom I should be ashamed to
show you for your old friend; but not a hope of my dying soon and
cleanly, and "winning off the stage." Rather I am daily better in
physical health. I shall have to see this business out, after all; and I
think, in that case, they should have--they might have--spared me all my
ill-health this decade past, if it were not to unbar the doors. I have
no taste for old age, and my nose is to be rubbed in it in spite of my
face. I was meant to die young, and the gods do not love me.

This is very like an epitaph, bar the handwriting, which is anything but
monumental, and I dare say I had better stop. Fanny is down at her own
cottage planting or deplanting or replanting, I know not which, and she
will not be home till dinner, by which time the mail will be all closed,
else she would join me in all good messages and remembrances of love. I
hope you will congratulate Burne Jones from me on his baronetcy. I
cannot make out to be anything but raspingly, harrowingly sad; so I will
close, and not affect levity which I cannot feel. Do not altogether
forget me; keep a corner of your memory for the exile

LOUIS.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

[_Vailima, May 1894._]

MY DEAR CHARLES,--My dear fellow, I wish to assure you of the greatness
of the pleasure that this Edinburgh Edition gives me. I suppose it was
your idea to give it that name. No other would have affected me in the
same manner. Do you remember, how many years ago--I would be afraid to
hazard a guess--one night when I communicated to you certain intimations
of early death and aspiration after fame? I was particularly maudlin;
and my remorse the next morning on a review of my folly has written the
matter very deeply in my mind; from yours it may easily have fled. If
any one at that moment could have shown me the Edinburgh Edition, I
suppose I should have died. It is with gratitude and wonder that I
consider "the way in which I have been led." Could a more preposterous
id