I have been wanting to write to you but felt that Ireland wouldn't permit. I can imagine what you and G. must have felt. This morning there is news that three leaders are shot and it's horrible reading. It's difficult to get any coherent account of anything down here but Garvin in The Observer last Sunday very nearly brought one off. There is no accounting for Ireland—The fact that while one street was under hot fire and people falling in all directions the milkmen with their rattling little cans went on delivering milk seemed, as Lawrence would say, “pretty nearly an absolute symbol.”

If I had a box I'd send you flowers; but I've nothing but a Vinolia Soap box and the violets would arrive in a lather. As soon as I have a box you shall have some. This country is very lovely just now with every kind of little growing thing—and the gorse among the grey rocks is, as Mrs. P. H. would agree, ‘very satisfactory.’ There are a great many adders here too. How does one cure oneself of their bite? You either bathe the afflicted part with a saucer of milk or you give the saucer of milk to the adder.

There is a creek close by our house that rushes down a narrow valley and then falls down a steep cliff into the sea. The banks are covered with primroses and violets and bluebells. I paddle in it and feel like a faint, far-off reflection of the George Meredith Penny Whistle Overture, but awfully faint. Murry spends all his time page 69 hunting for his horn-rimmed spectacles for whenever he leaps over a stile or upon a mossy stone they fly from him, incredible distances, and undergo a strange and secret change into caterpillars, dragon flies or bracken uncurling.

To-day I can't see a yard, thick mist and rain and a tearing wind with it. Everything is faintly damp. The floor of the tower is studded with Cornish pitchers catching the drops. Except for my little maid (whose ankles I can hear stumping about the kitchen) I am alone, for Murry and Lawrence have plunged off to St. Ives with rucksacks on their backs and Frieda is in her cottage. It's very quiet in the house except for the wind and the rain and the fire that roars very hoarse and fierce. I feel as though I and the Cornish Pasty ¹ had drifted out to sea—and would never be seen again. But I love such days—rare lonely days. I love above all things, my dear, to be alone. Then I lie down and smoke and look at the fire and begin to think out an Extraordinarily good story about Marseilles. I've re-read my novel to-day, too and now I can't believe I wrote it…