t minute I feel it a positive impossibility to take it up again,
until imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk. I walk about
brimful of letters, facetious descriptions, touching morsels, and
pathetic friendships, but can't for the soul of me uncork myself.
The post-office is my rock ahead. My average number of letters that
_must_ be written every day is, at the least, a dozen. And you could
no more know what I was writing to you spiritually, from the perusal
of the bodily thirteenth, than you could tell from my hat what was
going on in my head, or could read my heart on the surface of my
flannel waistcoat.

This is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff
whereon--in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay--our house stands;
the sea rolling and dashing under the windows. Seven miles out are
the Goodwin Sands, (you've heard of the Goodwin Sands?) whence
floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if they were
carrying on intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big
lighthouse called the North Foreland on a hill behind the village, a
severe parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters,
and stares grimly out upon the sea. Under the cliff are rare good
sands, where all the children assemble every morning and throw up
impossible fortifications, which the sea throws down again at high
water. Old gentlemen and ancient ladies flirt after their own manner
in two reading-rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open
air. Other old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and never
see anything. In a bay-window in a one pair sits from nine o'clock
to one a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who
writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His
name is Boz. At one he disappears, and presently emerges from a
bathing-machine, and may be seen--a kind of salmon-colored
porpoise--splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be seen
in another bay-window on the ground-floor, eating a strong lunch;
after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the
sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is
disposed to be talked to; and I am told he is very comfortable
indeed. He's as brown as a berry, and they _do_ say is a small
fortune to the innkeeper who sells beer and cold punch. But this