The blue-green sea is living velvet, and full of light-rings; it
goes out to a distant mauve horizon, near which sea-gulls with white
gleaming wings are flying. Many gulls are fluttering on the red buoys
in the water.

It is late in a December afternoon on the south coast of the Crimea.
It is Yalta, beloved of all Russians, and I have come tramping to
it--which Russians never do--and I am intending to spend lazy days
looking with the gay town and all its white villas at the glorious
spectacle of the southern sea. All the rest of Russia is gripped by
winter, but here there is sanctuary and forgiveness. I have been
tramping on the cold, cold steppes, frozen, forced to get back into
myself and hide like the trees, and when I came here it seemed somehow
as if Nature herself had been angry with me, relented, and was now
showing me all her tenderness again. All along the road I found
violets in the little bushes, and I wore them as a forgiveness gift
from a woman that I love.

When a woman smiles upon a man she bids him live, and when she frowns
he can but die. To-day the woman of all women has smiled on me, Nature
herself.

Along the road I had that pleasant life with myself that one has the
day after one's birthday, when one has kept good resolutions two days.
My old self carried, as it were, within me a little child, and the
child chattered and lisped to me.

Delightful tramping along a road high over the shore! Below me,
stretching far to East and to West, blue and glorious like summer, was