writing at all. De Quincey tells us how the dalesmen of Lakeland a
century ago used to dodge the postal charges. The letter that came by stage
coach was received at the door by the poor mother, who glanced at the
superscription, saw from a certain agreed sign on it that Tom or Jim was
well, and handed it back to the carrier unopened. In those days a letter
was an event.

Now when you can send a letter half round the globe for a penny, and when
the postman calls half a dozen times a day, few of us take letter-writing
seriously. Carlyle saw that the advent of the penny post would kill the
letter by making it cheap. "I shall send a penny letter next time," he
wrote to his mother when the cheap postage was about to come in, and he
foretold that people would not bother to write good letters when they could
send them for next to nothing. He was right, and the telegraph, the
telephone, and the postcard have completed the destruction of the art of
letter-writing. It is the difficulty or the scarcity of a thing that makes
it treasured. If diamonds were as plentiful as pebbles we shouldn't stoop
to pick them up.

But the case of Bill and Sam and thousands of their comrades to-day is
different. They don't want to write literary letters, but they do want to
tell the folks at home something about their life and the great things of
which they are a part. But the great things are too great for them. They
cannot put them into words. And they ought not to try, for the secret of
letter-writing is intimate triviality. Bill could not have described the
retreat from Mons; but he could have told, as he told me, about the blister
he got on his heel, how he hungered for a smoke, how he marched and marched
until he fell asleep marching, how he lost his pal at Le Cateau, and how
his boot sole dropped off at Meaux. And through such trivialities he would
have given a living picture of the great retreat.

In short, to write a good letter you must approach the job in the lightest
and most casual way. You must be personal, not abstract. You must not say,
"This is too small a thing to put down." You must say, "This is just the
sort of small thing we talk about at home. If I tell them this they will
see me, as it were, they'll hear my voice, they'll know what I'm about."
That is the purpose of a letter. Keats expresses the idea very well in one
of those voluminous letters which he wrote to his brother George and his
wife in America and in which he pou