ast finished, and I
have put away thirty-two pages of chips, and have spent thirteen days
about as nearly in Hell as a man could expect to live through. It's
done, and of course it ain't worth while, and who cares? There it is,
and about as grim a tale as was ever written, and as grimy, and as
hateful.

_______________________________________
| |
| SACRED |
| |
| TO THE MEMORY |
| |
| OF |
| |
| J. L. HUISH, |
| |
| BORN 1856, AT HACKNEY, LONDON |
| |
| Accidentally killed upon this Island, |
| |
| 10th September 1889. |
|_______________________________________|

_Tuesday, 6th._--I am exulting to do nothing. It pours with rain from
the westward, very unusual kind of weather; I was standing out on the
little verandah in front of my room this morning, and there went through
me or over me a wave of extraordinary and apparently baseless emotion. I
literally staggered. And then the explanation came, and I knew I had
found a frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland, and
particularly to the neighbourhood of Callander. Very odd these
identities of sensation, and the world of connotations implied;
highland huts, and peat smoke, and the brown, swirling rivers, and wet
clothes, and whisky, and the romance of the past, and that indescribable
bite of the whole thing at a man's heart, which is--or rather lies at
the bottom of--a story.

I don't know if you are a Barbey d'Aurevilly-an. I am. I have a great
delight in his Norman stories. Do you know the _Chevalier des Touches_
and _L'Ensorcelee_? They are admirable, they reek of the soil and the
past. But I was rather thinking just now of _Le Rideau Cramoisi_, and
its adorable setting of the stopped coach, the dark street, the
home-going in the inn yard, and the red blind illuminated. Without
doubt, _there_ was an identity of sensation; one of those conjunctions
in life that had filled Barbey full to the brim, and permanently bent
his memory.

I wonder exceedingly if I have done anything at all good; and who can
tell me? and why should