nd sways there like a pond-lily in the golden
afternoon. The window of my bedroom looks down on that piazza--and so do
I.

But enough of the nonsense, which ill becomes a sedate young attorney
taking his vacation with an invalid father. Drop me a line, dear Jack,
and tell me how you really are. State your case. Write me a long, quite
letter. If you are violent or abusive, I'll take the law to you.

III.

JOHN FLEMMING TO EDWARD DELANEY.

August 11, 1872.

Your letter, dear Ned, was a godsend. Fancy what a fix I am in--I, who
never had a day's sickness since I was born. My left leg weighs three
tons. It is embalmed in spices and smothered in layers of fine linen,
like a mummy. I can't move. I haven't moved for five thousand years. I'm
of the time of Pharaoh.

I lie from morning till night on a lounge, staring into the hot street.
Everybody is out of town enjoying himself. The brown-stone-front houses
across the street resemble a row of particularly ugly coffins set up on
end. A green mould is settling on the names of the deceased, carved on
the silver door-plates. Sardonic spiders have sewed up the key-holes.
All is silence and dust and desolation.--I interrupt this a moment, to
take a shy at Watkins with the second volume of Cesar Birotteau. Missed
him! I think I could bring him down with a copy of Sainte-Beuve or the
Dictionnaire Universel, if I had it. These small Balzac books somehow
do not quite fit my hand; but I shall fetch him yet. I've an idea that
Watkins is tapping the old gentleman's Chateau Yquem. Duplicate key of
the wine-cellar. Hibernian swarries in the front basement. Young Cheops
up stairs, snug in his cerements. Watkins glides into my chamber,
with that colorless, hypocritical face of his drawn out long like an
accordion; but I know he grins all the way down stairs, and is glad I
have broken my leg. Was not my evil star in the very zenith when I
ran up to town to attend that dinner at Delmonico's? I didn't come up
altogether for that. It was partly to buy Frank Livingstone's roan
mare Margot. And now I shall not be able to sit in the saddle these two
months. I'll send the mare down to you at The Pines--is that the name of
the place?

Old Dillon fancies that I have something on my mind. He drives me wild
with lemons. Lemons for a mind diseased! Nonsense. I am only as restless
as the devil under this confinement--a thing I'm not used to. Take a
man who has never had so much as a headache o