ooking at it some while over the
down-hill profile of our eastern road when I chanced to glance
northward, and saw with extraordinary pleasure the sea lying outspread.
It seemed as smooth as glass, and yet I knew the surf was roaring all
along the reef, and indeed, if I had listened, I could have heard
it--and saw the white sweep of it outside Matautu.

I am out of condition still, and can do nothing, and toil to be at my
pen, and see some ink behind me. I have taken up again _The High Woods
of Ulufanua_. I still think the fable too fantastic and far-fetched.
But, on a re-reading, fell in love with my first chapter, and for good
or evil I must finish it. It is really good, well fed with facts, true
to the manners, and (for once in my works) rendered pleasing by the
presence of a heroine who is pretty. Miss Uma is pretty; a fact. All my
other women have been as ugly as sin, and like Falconet's horse (I have
just been reading the anecdote in Lockhart), _mortes_ forbye.

News: our old house is now half demolished; it is to be rebuilt on a new
site; now we look down upon and through the open posts of it like a
bird-cage, to the woods beyond. My poor Paulo has lost his father and
succeeded to thirty thousand thalers (I think); he had to go down to the
consulate yesterday to send a legal paper; got drunk, of course, and is
still this morning in so bemused a condition that our breakfasts all went
wrong. Lafaele is absent at the deathbed of his fair spouse; fair she
was, but not in deed, acting as harlot to the wreckers at work on the
warships, to which society she probably owes her end, having fallen off a
cliff, or been thrust off it--_inter pocula_. Henry is the same, our
stand-by. In this transition stage he has been living in Apia; but the
other night he stayed up, and sat with us about the chimney in my room.
It was the first time he had seen a fire in a hearth; he could not look
at it without smiles, and was always anxious to put on another stick. We
entertained him with the fairy tales of civilisation--theatres, London,
blocks in the street, Universities, the Underground, newspapers, etc.,
and projected once more his visit to Sydney. If we can manage, it will be
next Christmas. (I see it will be impossible for me to afford a further
journey _this_ winter.) We have spent since we have been here about
L2,500, which is not much if you consider we have built on that three
houses, one of them of some size, and a considerable