not know how long, sitting there and repeating to myself
these lines. It is wonderful how things somehow fall into a full
satisfying harmony, and out of the fewest elements there is established
a sort of small perfection. It was so this morning. I did not want
anything further.

TO MRS. SITWELL

In the third week of December I went out to join my friend for a part
of the Christmas vacation, and found him without tangible disease,
but very weak and ailing: ill-health and anxiety, however, neither
then nor at any time diminished his charm as a companion. He left
Mentone to meet me at the old town of Monaco, where we spent a few
days and from whence these stray notes of nature and human nature
were written.

_Monaco, Tuesday [December 1873]._

We have been out all day in a boat; lovely weather and almost dead calm,
only the most infinitesimal and indeterminate of oscillations moved us
hither and thither; the sails were duly set, and flapped about idly
overhead. Our boatman was a man of a delightful humour, who told us many
tales of the sea, notably one of a doctor, who was an Englishman, and
who seemed almost an epitome of vices--drunken, dishonest, and utterly
without faith; and yet he was a _charmant garcon_. He told us many
amusing circumstances of the doctor's incompetence and dishonesty, and
imitated his accent with a singular success. I couldn't quite see that
he was a charming _garcon_--"_O, oui_--_comme caractere, un charmant
garcon_." We landed on that Cap Martin, the place of firs and rocks and
myrtle and rosemary of which I spoke to you. As we pulled along in the
fresh shadow, the wonderfully clean scents blew out upon us, as if from
islands of spice--only how much better than cloves and cinnamon!

_Friday._--Colvin and I are sitting on a seat on the battlemented
gardens of Old Monaco. The day is grey and clouded, with a little red
light on the horizon, and the sea, hundreds of feet below us, is a sort
of purple dove-colour. Shrub-geraniums, firs, and aloes cover all
available shelves and terraces, and where these become impossible, the
prickly pear precipitates headlong downwards its bunches of oval plates;
so that the whole face of the cliff is covered with an arrested fall
(please excuse clumsy language), a sort of fall of the evil angels
petrified midway on its career. White gulls sail past below us every now
and then, sometimes singly, sometimes by twos and threes, an