ol door. But
colour is not an essential part of a man or a race. Take my Polynesians,
an Asiatic people probably from the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf.
They range through any amount of shades, from the burnt hue of the Low
Archipelago islander, which seems half negro, to the "bleached" pretty
women of the Marquesas (close by on the map), who come out for a
festival no darker than an Italian; their colour seems to vary directly
with the degree of exposure to the sun. And, as with negroes, the babes
are born white; only it should seem a _little sack_ of pigment at the
lower part of the spine, which presently spreads over the whole field.
Very puzzling. But to return. The Picts furnish to-day perhaps a third
of the population of Scotland, say another third for Scots and Britons,
and the third for Norse and Angles is a bad third. Edinburgh was a
Pictish place. But the fact is, we don't know their frontiers. Tell some
of your journalist friends with a good style to popularise old Skene; or
say your prayers, and read him for yourself; he was a Great Historian,
and I was his blessed clerk, and did not know it; and you will not be in
a state of grace about the Picts till you have studied him. J. Horne
Stevenson (do you know him?) is working this up with me, and the fact
is--it's not interesting to the public--but it's interesting, and very
interesting, in itself, and just now very embarrassing--this rural
parish supplied Glasgow with such a quantity of Stevensons in the
beginning of last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be
able to go back to the eleventh century, always undistinguished, but
clearly traceable. When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to
mean a dozen. What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation
of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of
character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on
in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get
used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing;
the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of
life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic--or maenadic--foundations, form
a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days
to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They _are_
anyway, and whether I wish it or not.

I remember very well your attitude to life, this conventional surface of
it.