uman, and wholly ghostly
gusto. "By the ghost of a mathematician" the book might be announced. A
very brave, honest book.

Your letter to hand.

Fact is, I don't like the picter.[80] O, it's a good picture, but if you
_ask_ me, you know, I believe, stoutly believe, that mankind, including
you, are going mad. I am not in the midst with the other frenzy dancers,
so I don't catch it wholly; and when you show me a thing--and ask me,
don't you know--Well, well! Glad to get so good an account of the
_Amateur Emigrant_. Talking of which, I am strong for making a volume
out of selections from the South Sea letters; I read over again the King
of Apemama, and it is good in spite of your teeth, and a real curiosity,
a thing that can never be seen again, and the group is annexed and
Tembinoka dead. I wonder, couldn't you send out to me the _first_ five
Butaritari letters and the Low Archipelago ones (both of which I have
lost or mislaid) and I can chop out a perfectly fair volume of what I
wish to be preserved. It can keep for the last of the series.

_Travels and Excursions_, vol. II. Should it not include a paper on S. F.
from the Mag. of Art? The A. E., the New Pacific capital, the Old ditto.
_Silver._ _Squat._ This would give all my works on the States; and though
it ain't very good, it's not so very bad. _Travels and Excursions_, vol.
III., to be these resuscitated letters--_Miscellanies_, vol. II.--_comme
vous voudrez, cher monsieur!_

_Monday, Aug. 13th._--I have a sudden call to go up the coast and must
hurry up with my information. There has suddenly come to our naval
commanders the need of action, they're away up the coast bombarding the
Atua rebels. All morning on Saturday the sound of the bombardment of
Luatuanu'u kept us uneasy. To-day again the big guns have been sounding
further along the coast. One delicious circumstance must not be
forgotten. Our blessed President of the Council--a kind of hoary-headed
urchin, with the dim, timid eyes of extreme childhood and a kind of
beautiful simplicity that endears him to me beyond words--has taken the
head of the army--honour to him for it, for his place is really
there--and gone up the coast in the congenial company of his
housekeeper, a woman coming on for sixty with whom he takes his walks
abroad in the morning in his shirt-sleeves, whom he reads to at night
(in a kind of Popular History of Germany) in the silence of the
Presidential mansion, and with whom (and a couple