I owe you letters, thanks — I'm in your debt all round and you must be thinking I am an ungrateful creature — to say the very least of it. But I feel as though I've been on a voyage lately — on the high seas — out of sight of land, and though some albatross post has brought your news under it's wing I've never been able to detain the bird long enough to send an answer back. Forgive me.

The little book is a rare find. I've not only read every word and stared the pictures (especially the crocodile and the little lamb who doth skip and play, always merry, always gay) out of countenance. I've begun a queer story on the strength of it about a child who learnt reading from this little primer ¹ — Merciful Heavens! think of all the little heads bowed over these tiny pages, all the little hands tracing the letters and think of the rooms in which they sat — and the leaping light they read by, half candle light, half fire — and how terribly frightened they must have been as they read about this Awful God waiting to pop them into Eternal Flames to consume them utterly and wither them like grass... Did you read the poems? And did your eye fasten upon Mr. John Rogers, the first martyr in Queen Mary's Reign, laughing, really rather callously, as he burned away in sight of his wife and Nine Small Children? They certainly were peculiarly hideous children and his wife looks as though she had wasted his substance upon buying hats, but all the same it's a bit steep to show your feelings as he is doing.

I am working very hard just now — I can't walk about or go out. Nearly all my days are spent in bed or if not in bed on a little sofa that always feels like lying in a railway carriage — a horrid page 2 little sofa. I have seen hardly any people at all since I've been here — nobody to talk to — The one great talker is the sea. It never is quiet; one feels sometimes as if one were a shell filled with a hollow sound. God forbid that another should ever live the life I have known here and yet there are moments you know, old Boy, when after a dark day there comes a sunset — such a glowing gorgeous marvellous sky that one forgets all in the beauty of it — these are the moments when I am really writing — Whatever happens I have had these blissful, perfect moments and they are worth living for. I thought, when I left England, I could not love writing more than I did, but now I feel I've never known what it is to be a writer until I came here —