oom-boom.) It is most
distracting in itself; and the thought of the poor devils in their fort
(boom) with their bits of rifles far from pleasant. (Boom-boom.) You can
see how quick it goes, and I'll say no more about Mr. Bow-wow, only you
must understand the perpetual accompaniment of this discomfortable
sound, and make allowances for the value of my copy. It is odd, though,
I can well remember, when the Franco-Prussian war began, and I was in
Eilean Earraid, far enough from the sound of the loudest cannonade, I
could _hear_ the shots fired, and I felt the pang in my breast of a man
struck. It was sometimes so distressing, so instant, that I lay in the
heather on the top of the island, with my face hid, kicking my heels for
agony. And now, when I can hear the actual concussion of the air and
hills, when I _know_ personally the people who stand exposed to it, I am
able to go on _taut bien que mal_ with a letter to James Payn! The
blessings of age, though mighty small, are tangible. I have heard a
great deal of them since I came into the world, and now that I begin to
taste of them--Well! But this is one, that people do get cured of the
excess of sensibility; and I had as lief these people were shot at as
myself--or almost, for then I should have some of the fun, such as it
is.

You are to conceive me, then, sitting in my little gallery room, shaken
by these continual spasms of cannon, and with my eye more or less singly
fixed on the imaginary figure of my dear James Payn. I try to see him in
bed; no go. I see him instead jumping up in his room in Waterloo Place
(where _ex hypothesi_ he is not), sitting on the table, drawing out a
very black briar-root pipe, and beginning to talk to a slim and
ill-dressed visitor in a voice that is good to hear and with a smile
that is pleasant to see. (After a little more than half an hour, the
voice that was ill to hear has ceased, the cannonade is over.) And I am
thinking how I can get an answering smile wafted over so many leagues
of land and water, and can find no way.

I have always been a great visitor of the sick; and one of the sick I
visited was W. E. Henley, which did not make very tedious visits, so
I'll not get off much purgatory for them. That was in the Edinburgh
Infirmary, the old one, the true one, with Georgius Secundus standing
and pointing his toe in a niche of the facade; and a mighty fine
building it was! And I remember one winter's afternoon, in that place of
mise