could not stand it to see you
break your heart here through disappointment as I mayhap may do."

Here is the artistic, impressionable temperament, easily disheartened,
with little self-reliant courage or grit. But he seems to have felt a
little ashamed of his plaint, for at midnight of the same day he wrote a
second letter, half apologetic and much more hopeful, just because one
or two people had been a little kind and he had been taken out to a
_fest_.

Soon after, he wrote a letter to his younger son, then a small boy. It
told of a pleasant drive to the Rhine, a few miles away. He concludes:
"It was all very wonderful, but Papa thought after all he was glad his
boys live in a country that is as yet _pure_ and _sweet_ and _good_--not
in one where every field seems to cry out with the remembrance of
bloodshed and wrong, and where so many people have lived and suffered
that tonight, under this clear moon, their very ghosts seemed to throng
the road and dispute our right of way. Be thankful, my dear boy, that
you are an American. Papa was never so fond of his country before as in
this land that has been so great, powerful, and so very hard and
wicked."

In May, 1880, he was made Consul at Glasgow, a position that he filled
for five years. During this period he spent a considerable part of his
time in London and in visiting at country homes. He lectured and wrote
and made many friends, among the most valued of whom were William Black
and Walter Besant.

A new administration came in with 1885 and Harte was superseded. He went
to London and settled down to a simple and regular life. For ten years
he lived with the Van de Veldes, friends of long standing. He wrote with
regularity and published several volumes of stories and sketches. In
1885 Harte visited Switzerland. Of the Alps he wrote: "In spite of their
pictorial composition I wouldn't give a mile of the dear old Sierras,
with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for a
hundred thousand kilometers of the picturesque Vaud."

Of Geneva he wrote: "I thought I should not like it, fancying it a kind
of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old
reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau and the De
Staels, still lingered." But he did like it, and wrote brilliantly of
Lake Leman and Mont Blanc.

Returning to his home in Aldershot he resumed work, giving some time to
a libretto for a musical comedy, but his health