s old friend Mrs. Sitwell to the same
place, at the same time, to watch beside the deathbed of her son--the
youth commemorated in the verses headed _F. A. S., In Memoriam_,
afterwards published in _Underwoods_. The following letter refers to
a copy of Carlyle's _Reminiscences_ which I had sent him some time
after I came back to England.

_Hotel Belvedere, Davos, [Spring 1881]._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--My health is not just what it should be; I have lost
weight, pulse, respiration, etc., and gained nothing in the way of my
old bellows. But these last few days, with tonic, cod-liver oil, better
wine (there is some better now), and perpetual beef-tea, I think I have
progressed. To say truth, I have been here a little over long. I was
reckoning up, and since I have known you, already quite a while, I have
not, I believe, remained so long in any one place as here in Davos. That
tells on my old gipsy nature; like a violin hung up, I begin to lose
what music there was in me; and with the music, I do not know what
besides, or do not know what to call it, but something radically part of
life, a rhythm, perhaps, in one's old and so brutally over-ridden
nerves, or perhaps a kind of variety of blood that the heart has come to
look for.

I purposely knocked myself off first. As to F. A. S., I believe I am no
sound authority; I alternate between a stiff disregard and a kind of
horror. In neither mood can a man judge at all. I know the thing to be
terribly perilous, I fear it to be now altogether hopeless. Luck has
failed; the weather has not been favourable; and in her true heart, the
mother hopes no more. But--well, I feel a great deal, that I either
cannot or will not say, as you well know. It has helped to make me more
conscious of the wolverine on my own shoulders, and that also makes me a
poor judge and poor adviser. Perhaps, if we were all marched out in a
row, and a piece of platoon firing to the drums performed, it would be
well for us; although, I suppose--and yet I wonder!--so ill for the poor
mother and for the dear wife. But you can see this makes me morbid.
_Sufficit; explicit_.

You are right about the Carlyle book; F. and I are in a world not ours;
but pardon me, as far as sending on goes, we take another view: the
first volume, _a la bonne_ _heure!_ but not--never--the second. Two
hours of hysterics can be no good matter for a sick nurse, and the
strange, hard, old being in so lamentable and yet huma