t, alas! might as well
be on my way home from Cochin China, for any chance I have of speedily
arriving. Meantime your letters will reach me here with speed, and
will be a great comfort to me, if they don't fatigue _you_.

* * * * *

"FRONDES AGRESTES."

PERUGIA, _12th June_ (1874).

I am more and more pleased at the thought of this gathering of yours,
and soon expect to tell you what the bookseller says.

Meantime I want you to think of the form the collection should take
with reference to my proposed re-publication. I mean to take the
botany, the geology, the Turner defense, and the general art criticism
of "Modern Painters," as four separate books, cutting out nearly all
the preaching, and a good deal of the sentiment. Now what you find
pleasant and helpful to you of general maxim or reflection, _must_ be
of some value; and I think therefore that your selection will just do
for me what no other reader could have done, least of all I myself;
keep together, that is to say, what may be right and true of those
youthful thoughts. I should like you to add anything that specially
pleases you, of whatever kind; but to keep the notion of your book
being the didactic one as opposed to the other picturesque and
scientific volumes, will I think help you in choosing between passages
when one or other is to be rejected.

* * * * *

HOW HE FELL AMONG THIEVES.

ASSISI, _17th June_ (1874).

I have been having a bad time lately, and have no heart to write to
you. Very difficult and melancholy work, deciphering what remains of a
great painter[9] among stains of ruin and blotches of repair, of five
hundred years' gathering. It makes me sadder than idleness, which is
saying much.

I was greatly flattered and petted by a saying in one of your last
letters, about the difficulty I had in unpacking my mind. That is
true; one of my chief troubles at present is with the quantity of
things I want to say at once. But you don't know how I find things I
laid by carefully in it, all moldy and moth-eaten when I take them
out; and what a lot of mending and airing they need, and what a
wearisome and bothering business it is compared to the early
packing,--one used to be so proud to get things into the corners
neatly!

I have been failing in my drawings, too, and I'm in a horrible inn
kept by a Garibaldian ba