father's expression), the "loss" of our family is
that we are disbelievers in the morrow--perhaps I should say, rather, in
next year. The future is _always_ black to us; it was to Robert
Stevenson; to Thomas; I suspect to Alan; to R. A. M. S. it was so almost
to his ruin in youth; to R. L. S., who had a hard hopeful strain in him
from his mother, it was not so much so once, but becomes daily more so.
Daily so much more so, that I have a painful difficulty in believing I
can ever finish another book, or that the public will ever read it.

I have so huge a desire to know exactly what you are doing, that I
suppose I should tell you what I am doing by way of an example. I have a
room now, a part of the twelve-foot verandah sparred in, at the most
inaccessible end of the house. Daily I see the sunrise out of my bed,
which I still value as a tonic, a perpetual tuning fork, a look of God's
face once in the day. At six my breakfast comes up to me here, and I
work till eleven. If I am quite well, I sometimes go out and bathe in
the river before lunch, twelve. In the afternoon I generally work again,
now alone drafting, now with Belle dictating. Dinner is at six, and I am
often in bed by eight. This is supposing me to stay at home. But I must
often be away, sometimes all day long, sometimes till twelve, one, or
two at night, when you might see me coming home to the sleeping house,
sometimes in a trackless darkness, sometimes with a glorious tropic
moon, everything drenched with dew--unsaddling and creeping to bed; and
you would no longer be surprised that I live out in this country, and
not in Bournemouth--in bed.

My great recent interruptions have (as you know) come from politics; not
much in my line, you will say. But it is impossible to live here and not
feel very sorely the consequences of the horrid white mismanagement. I
tried standing by and looking on, and it became too much for me. They
are such illogical fools; a logical fool in an office, with a lot of red
tape, is conceivable. Furthermore, he is as much as we have any reason
to expect of officials--a thoroughly common-place, unintellectual lot.
But these people are wholly on wires; laying their ears down, skimming
away, pausing as though shot, and presto! full spread on the other tack.
I observe in the official class mostly an insane jealousy of the
smallest kind, as compared to which the artist's is of a grave, modest
character--the actor's, even; a desire to extend