lagship is still a fixture, and the wind round in the
blessed east, so I suppose the danger is over. But heaven is still
laden; the day dim, with frequent rattling bucketfuls of rain; and just
this moment (as I write) a squall went overhead, scarce striking us,
with that singular, solemn noise of its passage, which is to me
dreadful. I have always feared the sound of wind beyond everything. In
my hell it would always blow a gale.

I have been all day correcting proofs, and making out a new plan for our
house. The other was too dear to be built now, and it was a hard task to
make a smaller house that would suffice for the present, and not be a
mere waste of money in the future. I believe I have succeeded; I have
taken care of my study anyway.

Two favours I want to ask of you. First, I wish you to get _Pioneering
in New Guinea_, by J. Chalmers. It's a missionary book, and has less
pretensions to be literature than Spurgeon's sermons. Yet I think even
through that, you will see some of the traits of the hero that wrote it;
a man that took me fairly by storm for the most attractive, simple,
brave, and interesting man in the whole Pacific. He is away now to go up
the Fly River; a desperate venture, it is thought; he is quite a
Livingstone card.

Second, try and keep yourself free next winter; and if my means can be
stretched so far, I'll come to Egypt and we'll meet at Shepheard's
Hotel, and you'll put me in my place, which I stand in need of badly by
this time. Lord, what bully times! I suppose I'll come per British Asia,
or whatever you call it, and avoid all cold, and might be in Egypt about
November as ever was--eleven months from now or rather less. But do not
let us count our chickens.

Last night three piglings were stolen from one of our pig-pens. The
great Lafaele appeared to my wife uneasy, so she engaged him in
conversation on the subject, and played upon him the following engaging
trick. You advance your two forefingers towards the sitter's eyes; he
closes them, whereupon you substitute (on his eyelids) the fore and
middle fingers of the left hand; and with your right (which he supposes
engaged) you tap him on the head and back. When you let him open his
eyes, he sees you withdrawing the two forefingers. "What that?" asked
Lafaele. "My devil," says Fanny. "I wake um, my devil. All right now. He
go catch the man that catch my pig." About an hour afterwards, Lafaele
came for further particulars. "O, all right,