esickness? I heard little Ethel Wynne,
the other day, talking about her first visit from home:

"They put me to bed, and I cried and cried all alone, and I was sick at
my stomach, and _I pitied me_."

"Poor Mother Bunch!" said her father. "Homesick!"

And I believe I "pity me," too. I must be a weak sort of a fellow. All
the men I meet are absorbed in something--horse--college--games. I am
sick for the unknown. Not the camp. I believe the loneliness there
would kill me now. O, why talk of it, for the sole use of spending
myself on paper! I am sick for her--her! Heavens--whatever that
means--how terrible it is to love a woman! Yet it seems so simple. If
she loved me--oh, she does love me, but she has her moods. She is
compact of fire and air and dew, and her path is like the swallow's.
How should I find her?

[Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Ernest Hume_]

I am taking violin lessons, as you suggest; also French. The verdict,
in each case, is that I have been wonderfully well taught. I begin to
know you for a genius. How have you managed to do so many things to
perfection? The Frenchman, Dr. Pascal, is stirring my brain more than
anything has yet succeeded in doing. So far I have felt like a muddy
pool in which the stars and gas lamps try to reflect themselves and get
only broken gleams in return. He is unsparingly critical of our
American civilization, and feels at liberty to say so to me, because I
am primeval man, fresh from my woods. He tells me such marvels of the
French. According to him, they are the creators of form: form in art,
in language, in mechanism. If I could reproduce his thought, it would
be to tell you that, as we are the youngest of nations, so, too, are we
the crudest. We are eaten up by an infinite complacency. Because we are
big, we fancy we blot out the sun whenever we choose to turn our bulk.
We submit to a thousand public abuses because we are too drenched in
our own fatness to criticise or disturb ourselves. The individual is
rampant, and all are enslaved. Consequently, this is not the land of
liberty, but of license, overrun by a wild chase of "every man for
himself." We worship our wealth, and not what it brings us. We adore
display; it tickles us more to scatter money broadcast in blazonry than
to live in chaste democracy and erect monuments to our public good. To
beauty we are almost totally blind and deaf; and what wonder, when
there is no _milieu_! We do not breathe an aesthetic atmosphere